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THE IRON MUSE 



BY 
JOHN CURTIS UNDERWOOD 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 
Ube Umicfeerbocfeer press 

1910 



75 



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S'*!. 



rial 



Copyright, 1910 

BY 

JOHN CURTIS UNDERWOOD 



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Ube ttnlcfcerbocfter flresa, View JSorfc 

©CLA265257 



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Co 
HERSELF 



Acknowledgments are due to the publishers of Everybody's 
and Ainslee's Magazines for permission to reprint the follow- 
ing poems:"The Captain" and "Beyond the Sea," published 
in Everybody's, "The Snow Peaks," "The Canyon," "The 
Desert," and "The Factory Whistles," published in Ainslee's 
at various times during the last ten years. 



CONTENTS 








I— THE GOD IN THE MACHINE 


PAGE 


The Press Room .... 


1 


The Bridge 










4 


The Railroad 










6 


The Air-Ships 










8 


The Power-House 










10 


The Foundry 










12 


The Coal Mine . 










14 


The Motor 










16 


The Search-Lights 










18 


The Trip Hammer 










20 


II— THE SEA 




The Lighthouse .... 


22 


The Captain 










24 


The Mines 










26 


The Fog . 










28 


The Wave . 










30 



Vlll 



Contents 



Beyond the Sea . 
The Coal Passers 
The Liner . 
The Sands . 
The Derelict 



III— WOMEN 

Motherhood 

The Incommensurable 

The Ultimate 

The Mother 

The Life Class 

The Cat . 

The Mirror 

Dust Devils (Les Mondaines) 

The Hilltop 

Love Letters of a Mother, VII 



IV— SCIENCE 



Wireless . 

The X-Rays 

Antitoxine 

Radium 

The Laboratory 



Contents 



IX 



The Consulting Room 




• 75 


The Uplift 




• 77 


The Frontiersman 




80 


The Chair 




• 83 


V— THE CITY 




Midnight — The Waiting-Room — Jersey City 84 


The Skyscrapers 


• 85 


The Highway 




. 87 


Herald Square . 




. 89 


The Factory Whistles 




. 90 


The Arena 




. 91 


The Crucible 




• 93 


The Switch Yard 




. 95 


The Moraine 




• 97 


The Clock in the Air 




• 98 


VI— THE INNER LIFE 




The City of Dreams . 


. 99 


The Dream 




100 


The Idol 




. 102 


Freedom 




. 104 


The Countersign 




. 106 



Contents 



The Real Thing 

Igdrasil .... 

Love Letters of an Evolutionist 
The Portrait 
Dream Children 



XI 



VII— THE WEST 



The Gun . 

The Floods 

Grain 

The Canyon 

The Snow Peaks 

The Roosevelt Dam 

The Stamps 

The Desert 

The Flume 

The Redman 



VIII— POLEMICS 



The Expatriates 

Money 

The Ballot 

The Sanctum 

The Armor Bearers 



Contents 



XI 



Sweat Shop Children 
The Child . 
The Victors 
Flotsam 
You . 



142 
144 
146 
149 
151 



IX— VARIA 



The Phonograph 






154 


The Song of the Wires 






156 


The Song of the Typewriter 






159 


The Tunnel 






161 


The Cotton Mill 






163 


The Supreme Court . 






165 


The Regiment . 






167 


The Ballet 






169 


The Symphony . 






171 


The Camera 






174 


X— VERITIES 


Pioneers 175 


The Talent 






. 177 


The Vision 






. 179 


The Machine 






. 181 


The Praetorians 






. 183 



Xll 



Contents 



PAGE 



The Home 185 

The Unfit l8 7 

The Slum 189 

The Iron Creed 19 l 

The Message *93 

ENVOY 

The Iron Muse 195 



FOREWORD 

HE whose word is life incarnate, who through 
countless ages grows, 
To a world of evolution more and more His labors 

shows ; 
More and more in man His image His eternal purpose 
knows : 

Who through pain and toil enduring, Tubal Cain's 

first hammers wrought, 
Piled the Pyramids, and slowly Rome from civic chaos 

brought, 
Taught the slow approach of science to the citadels of 

thought. 

Avatars of the Almighty first to mortal eyes revealed 
When a camp-fire first was kindled, when Achilles 

raised his shield; 
Learned to paint as Raphael painted, God in infant 

flesh concealed ; 

Learned to gaze with Galileo, learned to see as Newton 

saw 
Starry space a serried army of unalterable law; 
Learned from nature's last recesses Delphic words of 

life to draw. 



xiv Foreword 

Taught to-day to sift the atom, grasp the germ and 

probe the soul, 
Wrap the earth in rails of steel and wires that thrill 

from pole to pole, 
Baffle death and ride the whirlwind; God and man 

draw near their goal. 

Avatars of the Almighty, surgeon, chemist, engineer, 
Preach to-day a new Evangel. Air-ships soar, His 

angels. Fear 
Fails and fades; for man holds heaven in his hands 

to-day and here. 



THE IRON MUSE 



THE IRON MUSE 



I— THE GOD IN THE MACHINE 
THE PRESS ROOM 

HERE are the tables of the law, to-day in steel 
decreed ; 
The last supreme commandment, "Thou shalt 

strenuously succeed." 
The roaring presses multiply their Maker's restless 

will, 
His powers and portents magnify, His creatures cure 
and kill. 

The depths of ocean feel the stir these iron scribes 

translate. 
The ends of earth are garnered bare to swell their 

aggregate. 
Famine and plague are measured out and traders' 

prices rise. 
And war's red sponge of wreck and rout their problem 

simplifies. 

i 



2 THe Press Room 

From black and formless chaos the lines of type defile. 
Their columns massed are marching to their symphony 

of style, 
Through a discipline of thunder where the Titans 

swart are chained, 
And the presses close and sunder; to their triumph 

foreordained. 

The seas give up their secrets. The hills send down 

their gold 
Herein to be accounted for, and weighed, and tried, 

and told. 
And human hopes and prayers and fears, and loves 

and lusts are wrought 
Into the lasting fabric of the nation's noblest thought. 

Beneath the flimsy patterns and the proof-sheets of 

to-day 
They are printing here to-morrow through the months 

of long delay; 
The averages eternal that balance year by year, 
While stars and things supernal draw slowly near and 

clear. 

As nerves of sight and sentience will telegraph the 

brain 
The impulse and the warning of unreckoned joy and 

pain; 
To lurk in convolutions gray where germs of thought 

are stored, 
Until the will asserts its sway and chooses from its 

hoard : 



TKe Press Room 3 

So in the pregnant travail of the press room's fever 

heat, 
There broods where ocean cables and the wires of 

nations meet ; 
Omniscience making all things good through wars of 

creed and clan 
And vision sure of brotherhood through strife evolved 

in man. 

Paris, 5' 13 '08. 



THE BRIDGE 

SCOUTING the trail to the shortest ferry the cave 
men first were its pioneers. 
Lake dwellers grounded a rawhide wherry, sounded 

the shallows where stand these piers. 
Warriors and workers, clans and nations, planted their 

palisades, drove their piles. 
And the Romans builded its broad foundations, raised 
its approaches through blood red miles. 

And the ages of stone and of iron were ended. And 

the world raced on, on its rails of steel, 
And the thunders of God from the clouds descended 

roll through the wheels that these rivets feel. 
"Let there be light," by His lips was spoken, filling 

the void where He quenched the sun. 
And the silence of the hills was broken. And the arc 

lights flamed while the work was done. 

Planning a path in the empty air the master hand and 
the master brain 

Mounted the night as one mounts a stair, measured 
each torsion, thrust, and strain: 

Spinning his spider web of steel, breasted the whirl- 
wind, wrestled through. 

And the elements man's will shall feel. And their 
race and their rage are curbed anew. 

4 



THe Bridge 5 

This is our talisman and sign. This is our arch of a 

triumph vast. 
For the brute is cowed by the voice divine. The 

future mounts and o'errides the past. 
Over the girders the wires shall run, racing the trains 

through the midnight hurled. 
Heralds of thought they outstrip the sun; and they 

bear man's records around the world. 

Vibrant and strong as the wheels go rolling, out of the 
storm comes a symphony 

Sure as the eye that the train controlling gauges the 
pressure of days to be. 

Babes unborn in their mothers sleeping, thoughts un- 
dreamed in the poet's brain, 

Wealth of the world in His single keeping stream 
through the storm as He drives His train. 

Out of the night comes the snarl of the river. Though 

the beast is bound, he is strong to slay. 
And the girders rock till they seem to shiver. And 

the winds shall winnow the weak away. 
Now is your trial and your hour of trembling, perils of 

flaws and of shifting sand; 
Souls that must pass, now is no dissembling. Say 

have ye built so your bridge shall stand? 

Seattle, 9' 12 '09. 



THE RAILROAD 

I AM the trail that your fathers have followed 
westward from sea to sea. 
I am the skeleton grim you have fashioned to trouble 

the days to be; 
King of the genii loosed from my prison, in the mines 

that your greed has revealed; 
Reek of the breath of the wrath of Jehovah from the 
vials that your haste has unsealed. 

I am inertia of matter and motion, of wheels rolling on 

through the night; 
^Eon on aeon of long evolution through darkness 

advancing to light; 
Pressure of millions of men and of women, that want 

and oppression and wrong 
Thrust over seas to the west, to the prairies where the 

weak shall have space to grow strong. 

I am the impulse that stirs in your pulses, the vital 
unrest of the race 

Crushing the hours into seconds and striving to com- 
pass the conquest of space: 

Power that forces an outlet, expansion that circles the 
planet, that spreads 

Plowing the prairie, and felling the forests, and tramp- 
ling the white water sheds. 
6 



THe Railroad 7 

Snow peak and city are waked by my whistles. I am 

as sleepless as death; 
Strong as the lava that flows from the mountains. 

Nor may I pause to take breath 
More than the earth in its orbit unending, the growth 

of the grain that I bear 
Forth from the fields to the seas, to the steamers, that 

the nations that hunger may share. 

Last of the powers of nature and swiftest and 

strongest ; her master and son, 
Cleaving the mountains, and curbing the rivers, and 

reaping the desert I run. 
I am aggression, extortion, and fraud. By the road 

where my highwaymen ride 
Tidings and food for their need to the nations I bring, 

and my spoils I divide. 

I am the steel that is laid on your shoulders, the 

scourge that your sins have deserved. 
I am the pathway of God's own Evangel. Nor have 

His forerunners swerved. 
Faster and faster and nearer and nearer He rides to 

His triumph with me. 
I am His servant as strong and enduring and sure as 

His tides in His sea. 

Paris , io' 31 '08. 



THE AIR-SHIPS 

THEY are coming, earth crowds closer. Man that 
crept, that slept, shall soar; 
For the teeming millions' pressure thrusts us upward 

more and more. 
From the spirit's lowest sources life in spate is rising 

high; 
Floods the cities, reaps the desert, seeks the conquest 
of the sky. 

They are coming, war and havoc hover low and weight 

their wings; 
Death, destruction, rapine, pillage, till we rise to higher 

things. 
Flames of cities lit like torches still shall serve to show 

the way, 
We the race have won toward heaven since the first 

primordial day. 

Senseless atom, sponge, medusa, polyp, fish and snake 

and ape; 
Still existence winds its spiral, breasts the trail to 

higher shape. 
Still the zigzags reach and widen, still the outlook 

gains and grows. 
Birds, our scouts and heralds, lead us till man's soul 

its mission knows. 

8 



TKe Air-SHips 9 

Ages long of evolution, centuries of history, 

Lead us conquerors and captives to the day that sets 

us free; 
Till life's pilgrims, eyes uplifting, see the dawn begin 

to wake 
Near the holy mountain's summit ; till the slaves their 

shackles break. 

Unessential weight refining, casting off ; the vital speed 

Of the motor's pulse increasing, throbbing harder; we 
shall need 

Stronger hearts and surer vision. Some shall fall. 
But man shall reign, 

Halt and struggle, rise and triumph, heaven's out- 
works here attain. 

They are coming; unknown forces shall avail to lift 

them higher; 
Teach our hands to steer, nor tremble, through the 

lightning's shafts of fire; 
Ride the storm, and thread the whirlwind's maelstrom 

surely to our goal; 
Homeward race through space unerring to the harbors 

of the soul. 

Winds of Heaven, high archangels, cleave the clouds 

and wing their flight; 
Wider vistas spread by day and wider still illume at 

night; 
Till the spirit stripped of matter like a naked athlete 

stands 
On the brink of God's black ocean, yielding gladly to 

His hands. 

Paris, ii' 1 6 '08. 



THE POWER-HOUSE 

HERE have we focussed forces unknown until 
to-day. 
Here have we hived new powers of flame that swarm 

and stream away- 
Down highways dark where globes of light along the 

meadows bloom; 
Where lustrous lilies born of night dispel the city's 

gloom. 
Efficient, brisk, decisive, the master spirit goes, 
Reviews his restless regiment of humming dynamos, 
His orders gives and vanishes. No thought have such 

as he 
To glean the golden pollen of the midnight's mystery. 
Sufficient for their purpose they brought this thing 

to be. 

His row of dwarfs distorted an oiler stooping tends 

Intent upon the second when his term of bondage 
ends. 

His fellow slaves that prisoned here shall speed his 
flying car; 

Shall light his way, and to his ear bring tidings from 
afar; 

He sees not in the shadow where their ceaseless tread- 
mills turn. 

10 



THe Power- Hcmse n 

He does his share and goes his way. More bright the 

arc lights burn. 
And men and women walk the streets where once the 

lava flared. 
And science searching deeper yet than man has done 

or dared, 
Another cranny in the void to human sight has bared. 

High in His holy city in His power-house vast of space, 
The Master of us all looks. forth. He sees His planets 

race, 
His dynamos that generate the thought that compre- 
hends 
The infinite; the will that still the finite's grasp 

extends ; 
And love that shall interpret all and greater love beget. 
And the powers that dwell in darkness shall be 

delivered yet. 
He sets His finger to a switch. A world has ceased to 

be. 
Another flames new born ; with it His Son and such as 

we. 
And light shall dawn on darkest night, and teach blind 

eyes to see. 

Paris j ii' ii 'o8. 



THE FOUNDRY 

AS dawn darts forth from darkness like the loom of 
the rising sun, 
The crucible tilts outpouring the lights that leap and 

run. 
And they blaze as the shadows seize them like new- 
born planets cast 
To the swaddling clothes that midnight, the midwife 
lifts at last. 

Like the rush of a lava river, they flare through the 

narrow moulds, 
Till every sandy cradle a shape of splendor holds. 
And the fervor fails and the fever cools, and the heart 

of rose grows gray 
Till the sand with the thirst of a desert cold has 

drained its warmth away. 

Slowly they set and harden there as the dreams and 

the loves of youth 
Cool to the old man's shrunken strength in a world of 

wasted truth. 
Buried in coffins black they lie, ranged in the barren 

sands 
Till a day of resurrection sets free strange angels' 

hands. 

12 



THe Foundry 13 

Slowly the workmen lift them up, lifeless and rigid 

bars, 
Food for the forges roaring loud, and the stuff that 

shines in stars; 
In red reincarnation again to glow until 
They are wrought into keels for steamers and the 

wheels of mine and mill. 

They are rolled into plates that splinter the shells that 

shriek and fly 
Through the leagues of the reeling battle line in the 

strife of sea and sky. 
They are slowly shaped and tempered, whetted to steel 

as keen 
As the will of the surgeon cleaving surely life and death 

between. 

They are fashioned a planet's fetters, girders whose 

grip shall hold 
The bulk of the earth together, crumbling in final cold. 
Till the heart of man grows great as fate ; till his soul 

defies defeat; 
Here is his spirit's armor forged in the fires that his 

passions heat. 

Paris, 4' 21 '08. 



THE COAL MINE 

GOLD and crimson palely glimmer where their 
smoky skies are sinking low, 
While with eyes that see but dimly from the daylight 
and the dawn they go; 
Till the darkness of the pit has claimed its own. 
There they feel the dull depression of the stirless and 

the scentless air. 
There is winter's endless midnight but no wind has 
ever whispered there 
And the spring and fall and summer are unknown. 

Lost to them are form and color that all other weary 

mortals bless. 
All their stolid, pallid faces are unchanging in forget- 

fulness. 
Down the dimly lighted corridors they see 
Shapeless shadows, lamps that flicker, fading dreams 

of what was long ago. 
In the tunnels slowly sinking till at last they meet the 

night, they know 
All the brightness of the years that are to be. 

To a slow and mournful cadence, to the labor of the 

breath they draw; 
Strong in patience, striking blindly, they have beaten 

down the shapes they saw. 
14 



THe Coal Mine 15 

So their ears grow deaf to voices from within. 
Out of darkness into darkness in the freedom of the 

night they reel ; 
Out of weariness to slumber ; and their masters' heavy- 
hands they feel 
Till they see another dreary day begin. 

Buried sunshine lost for ages in the blackness of their 
quest they find; 

Brightness turning night to noonday, heat that warms 
the heart of humankind, 
Power making man the master of the sea ; 

Force that fettered not forever, finds fulfillment of it- 
self at last, 

Steam that coils the cage's cables which have linked 
them to the sordid past; 
To the future when their souls in strength go free. 

New York, 7' 26 '04. 



THE MOTOR 

JEHU was my grandsire grim. High Jehovah's 
child 
I was born to bring to you the beckon of the wild ; 
Framed and fined to send you forth through the flood 

of noise 
Where the city chokes and sweats ; deathless girls and 
boys. 

I was wrought with Vulcan's art, forged by Tubal 

Cain. 
Archimedes measured me. Newton's mighty brain 
Figured on my formulas. Thor my framework made. 
Hermes my forerunner was, god of thieves and trade. 

Wherefore in my destined hour I was sent to you ; 
Speed and subtlety and power, pledge of kingdoms 

new, 
Herald of the trackless trail to where the angels kneel ; 
Child of earth's divine desire born of fire and steel ; 

Thunderbolt of peace and war, chariot swift of God; 
I shall reinforce your ranks, open paths untrod; 
Bring the dream that never dies to shade the crowded 

street, 
Swaying boughs to weary eyes in noonday's fever heat. 

16 



Trie Motor 17 

Ye have filed the planets small. Air shod tires shall 
I roll 

Round my orbits over all earth from pole to pole. 
Ye have caged the powers of air; pulsing they respire 
Hills of space, creation's stair, mounting high and 
higher. 

Pioneers and charioteers ; who in wantonness 
Blindly and benighted steers, sets the pace no less. 
Reckless riders for the Throne, one eternal hand 
Holds my levers through your own; and man shall 
strive and stand. 

All the earth is speeded up. Some shall triumph. 

Some 
Whirling round the racing stars, hurled to kingdom 

come, 
Scorn the barriers dark of sleep, and storm the gates 

of day. 
Though our trail is shadowed deep the world is on its 

way. 

Suva Fiji, 4' 10 '09. 



THE SEARCH-LIGHTS 

GOD writes His scriptures still to-day. His mes- 
sages of light 
Out of the shadow start and stray away across the 

night, 
Through blinding seconds stop and stay to dazzle 
mortal sight. 

Whether from flaming battleship that hurls the bolts 

of death, 
Or from some tall skyscraper tower while thousands 

hold their breath 
Till the last vote is counted out, His final word He 

saith ; 

Whether o'er Afric rivers dark where darker deeds are 

done, 
Or where the red aurora's glare outshines the midnight 

sun, 
Or where an army's iron prayer e'er daybreak has 
begun : 

Ever He sends His ministers. His angels strong 

to-day, 
Soar through the press room's roar, explore the 

liner's fog-locked way; 
New antitoxines ever seek ; new credits grant and pay. 

18 



THe SearcH-LigHts 19 

He sends His search-lights through the eyes that scan 

the depths of space ; 
That planets weigh and scrutinize. He lends His 

servants grace, 
His elements to analyze, His working plans to trace. 

He sends His search-lights through the sheets men 

inked while millions slept ; 
His new beatitudes repeats till babes that died unwept 
In reeking slums and reckless streets, in mercy's arms 

have slept. 

He sends His search-lights through the soul that 

shrivels in its ray, 
Till one that from the millions stole shall shrink, and 

start away 
From focussed eyes that stare nor spare, to thole his 

judgment day. 

His moving finger points and probes. To worlds un- 
born it knows, 

Where some dead sun for centuries its final flicker 
throws 

Across the void as search-lights sweep, His eye unerr- 
ing goes. 

Paris, 6' 7 '08. 



THE TRIP HAMMER 

T RISE; 

1 Like the wrath of the Lord, shaking sea and skies, 

Gathered and raised like a lifted fist, 

Threatening earth like a stormy cloud 

Where the snakes of the lightning swarm and twist; 

Till the crash of the thunder cries aloud; 

And the bolt is loosed, and the levin flies. 

I fall; 

Like the arm of the Law that is over all. 

And the white hot molten metal rains 

A shower of sparks through the shadowed air 

Like the thrills of a thousand travail pains, 

Till the stuff of the soul is beaten bare, 

Flailed from its husk, and is sifted small. 

I am 

In the army of man its battering ram; 

Welding the girders that carry the track, 

That fetter the void, that rout delay; 

Battering storm and the blackness back. 

And I forge the keel that shall cleave the spray, 

And I raise the real, and I crush the sham. 

20 



TKe Trip Hammer 21 

I mark; 

The time of your march from dawn to dark. 

And my brothers roll on their iron drums 

The sound of the charge, and they summon all 

As the hour of your fall or your triumph comes 

Sluggard and dreamer, great and small 

To the battle of life. You can hear them, Hark ! 

Paris, 11 '7 '08. 



II— THE SEA 

THE LIGHTHOUSE 

1AM the ocean's finger-post. Hard by its high- 
way side 
I watch the long lean liners race ; and tossed by wind 

and tide 
I see the anchored fishing boats at straining halters 
ride. 

The storm wind's wolf pack round me raves and gal- 
lops through the night. 

In line on line of living graves the breakers slaver 
white, 

Till hailstones hurled from cloudy caves their clamors 
scourge and smite. 

Unstirred I stand. My shafts of light a bow shot 

through the storm 
Beat back the murk. Like golden wasps they stab 

and soar and swarm, 
Till sailors' sinking hearts revive; leap up alive and 

warm. 

Ten leagues of sea, ten leagues of shore, my whirling 
lanterns sweep 



THe LigHtHovxse 23 

With sleepless eyes ; and line on line the secrets of the 

deep 
I read. The blackness is my book while vigils lone I 

keep. 

Therein a gospel infinite the silences reveal. 

I telegraph the truth of it. The song of steam and 
steel 

I set to scale. I frame the phrase that men and moun- 
tains feel. 

My beacon baton rules and sways the tempest's 

symphony. 
In unrevealed unerring ways the elements with me 
In unison reiterate, "In service are we free." 

I focus force and faith in one. I am night's burning 
glass. 

I relay wireless messages of love from burnished brass. 

I show the spectrum clear of hope to souls that stran- 
gling pass. 

I am the ocean's finger-post, its pillar at the goal. 
Skyward I point where planets all round starlit courses 

roll; 
Where flaming comets blaze the trails, the orbits of the 

soul. 

New York, 11' 27 '07. 



N°2 



THE CAPTAIN 

chaffroned charger forth I ride through ringing 
lists to reel. 
No silver trumpet bids me bide the shock of steeds and 

steel. 
No golden spur no valor's bride hath bound behind my 
heel. 

But twice ten thousand horses' might is mine to rule 

and ride. 
My coursing ground hath utmost bound where ebbs 

the polar tide 
With glaciers' gleaming palisades upreared on either 

side. 

They loose their bergs to buffet me, the winds of all the 

seas 
Come urging surging squadrons out to leave me little 

ease. 
Their clarions rage, the siren's shout makes symphony 

with these. 

Sea mark and search -light share my aim till battle's 

day be born, 
Till all my reeking battleship, her haunches hacked 

and torn, 
Shall hurl her freight of flying death from out the 

bloodshot morn. 

24 



The Captain 25 

Helmed in my conning tower I see the stricken sea 

below. 
I lash my broadsides through the smoke. Bowed by 

some staggering blow 
I thrust my last torpedo forth to check a charging foe. 

So may I sink, so may I swim. Alone abides for me 
The winged victory of the wind that rules the restless 

sea. 
Our lady, steel thy soldiers' hearts with strong sweet 

breath of thee. 

New York, io* 5 '05. 



THE MINES 

WE lurk in your stillest harbors, in your crowded 
water ways, 
Till the Master's hand that made us has told its tale of 

days, 
And your strongest ships and captains come charging 

swiftly by; 
And then we rise and smite them from our ambush 
where we lie. " * 



Well may your hard hearts falter and tremble iron 

nerves. 
A single finger's pressure for scarce a second serves, 
And twenty thousand tons of steel and the life and 

death it bore 
In wreck and ruin red shall reel. And your millions 

are no more. 

For so in tones of thunder to hardened ears we say, 
"For every single sin you sin, in some way you shall 

pay." 
And He whose word eternal decrees that wars shall 

cease, 
Has made us mouths to preach to you the dearer price 

of peace. 

26 



THe Mines 27 

So shall you guard your bodies in peril and distress, 

While the many toil and hunger ; that one in wanton- 
ness 

May win to wealth and mastery ; who most of all has 
failed. 

Hath He not mined your spirits too, whose strong- 
holds are assailed? 

Paris, ii' 9 '08. 



THE FOG 

1AM the reek of the days that were and the breath 
of the days to be. 
All the ghosts of the ages swarm and stir when my 

hosts march in from sea; 
Till they sink as the twilight falls afar, and a deeper 

shade is laid 
On the sodden sands, and the stricken lands grow still 

and sore afraid, 
And I muffle the siren's warning note and I baffle the 

lighthouse beam. 
And the greasy rails down their long blind trails feel 

the slackening strength of steam. 
And the wheels turn slow and the fires grow low. 

City and countryside 
Choke in my grip, and sea and ship, where my still 

gray squadrons ride. 

And I pearl the long gray grasses by the buried sea- 
man's graves. 

Incense of unseen masses I lift from my lone sea caves, 

To the sound of a sigh that passes in the hush of the 
winds and waves. 

And I brood in the silence, lingering under the shroud 
of night 

As a widowed mother waits for the birth that brings 
her babe to light, 

28 



THe Fog; 29 

On earth till the birth of the flowers of spring and the 

blue bird's nesting call. 
And I crouch till the stars grow clear again, till the 

bars of the morning fall ; 
Till I kiss the cheek of a child that smiles e'er the sun 

stands lord of all. 

For I am the darkness, the doubt, the dread that stifle 

your hopes and prayers, 
I am the fears of your fathers dead, and their mothers' 

tears and cares. 
I am the lives that start and lurk when the brightest 

noon burns dim 
In the shadows cold, in the mist and murk of the slum's 

blind menace grim. 
I am the strong man's well of strength, and the ford 

where the coward falls, 
And the gate that shall wait for all at length through 

the everlasting walls; 
Spores as of hoarfrost sifted o'er the fruitful field of 

night; 
Shreds of a banner rifted where dying heroes fight ; 
Or a curtain caught and lifted when you wake to a 

world of light. 

5. S. Amerika, 1' 7 '07. 



THE WAVE 

OUT of the darkness of time and the stress of an 
impulse unending, 
Out of the deep I arise, and shoreward unresting I 
roll; 
Till the breaker resounds on the beach and it curls 
and it crashes descending, 
And rending the sands it subsides ; and is scattered 
and swept from its goal. 

I am the impact of light on your eyes, and the glow 
and the gleam of the vision. 
I am a second of sound and the echo that stirs in 
the brain ; 
And the past that awakes and regrets and aspires ; and 
the hope of a harbor Elysian, 
Lost and recalled and disowned and restored, 
through a lifetime of passion and pain. 

I am the march of events past the purpose that cradles 
creation ; 
And the end of your millions of lives like the foam 
bells that whiten and fade ; 
And the roll of the drums down the ranks, and the 
charge of the steel crested wrath of a nation. 
I am the wailing of women that bury their dead in 
the shade. 

I am the round of the seasons ; the rose of the summer 
unfolding ; 

30 



THe Wave 31 

Swelling of sap in the spring, and its shrinkage 

when winter turns white. 
I am the song of your youth, and your autumn its 

bleakness beholding, 
I am the burden and the heat of the day, and the 

shadows and dreams of the night. 

I am the beat of your heart, and the breath that you 
draw when the morning 
Rises in fire on the hills; and the setting of moon, 
and of sun. 
I am the crest of to-day, and the fortune that fails 
without warning; 
And the triumph that fades ; and the struggle with 
death; and the rest when the battle is done. 

I am the spray that is scattered ; the laughter and loves 
of the city. 
I am the darkness below and the lives that the 
weight of the world shall sustain. 
I am the sorrow that sobs in the sea, and the tides of 
an infinite pity; 
And the whisper of winds, and the smile of a child, 
,and the ripple and rush of the rain. 

I am the passion whose strength is a snare, and the 
love whose redemption is friendless, 
I am your soul's resurrection from sin and from 
shame and the grave ; 
Growth of the grain, and the travail of life that toils 
through eternities endless. 
I am the pulse of the cosmos whose life is to God as 
a wave. 

Paris, n' 25 '08. 



BEYOND THE SEA 

BEYOND the sea the sun goes down. 
The gray gulls follow in his wake. 
There towering ships their cargoes take. 
There troop the clouds. There would I be 
In some fantastic foreign town, 
Where waves on coral beaches break; 
And brawny boatmen, bare and brown, 
Ply through the surf beyond the sea. 

Beyond the sea they traffic there 

In ambergris and frankincense; 

Strange furs that floor barbaric tents, 

And ostrich eggs and ivory ; 

And sandalwood and camel's hair; 

And uncut rubies, rare, immense; 

That women round their foreheads wear 

In wonderlands beyond the sea. 

Beyond the sea the temple bells 
Are calling Buddhist priests to prayer. 
There war drums tear the tropic air. 
The monsoon sighs incessantly; 
The mueddin calls, the jackal yells, 
The serpent charmer's fife is there. 
And still the mingled murmur swells 
And fills my ears beyond the sea. 
32 



Beyond tHe Sea 

From every weary breaker wells 
Resistlessly, implacably; 
In every heart forever dwells ; 
Unsatisfied, beyond the sea. 

Long Beach, 2' 26 '04. 



33 



THE COAL PASSERS 

FULL speed it is. The gauges rise. Each lip of 
vivid rose 
That grins around its furnace door, intense, insistent, 

glows, 
Fast gape and glut the mouths of fire. Hearts in hot 

haste shall beat. 
And lungs shall strain to drink and drain the torment 

tides of heat. 
For wind and wave have lift them up to rave against 

our way, 
And we that heed our engines' need their iron law 

obey. 

This was the law that once we saw afar and unawares. 
Now every yawning molten maw the gate of judgment 

flares. 
Stripped to the waist we hurl in haste the black, the 

naked soul, 
To feed the fast devouring flame that leaps to lick the 

coal. 
Earth's power-house is stoked in hell. None knew it 

more than we 
That drive ten thousand tons along a thousand leagues 

of sea. 

34 



THe Coal Passers 35 

Ten thousand tons, a thousand lives, a world that 

holds its course 
By night and day through fog and fray of waves, and 

braves their force; 
Unerring as the planet's sweep athwart the gulf of 

sky. 
This was the tale that once we told to girls in days 

gone by. 
Midmost a silver sea we hung, the winds, the world 

asleep ; 
While silver stars in order swung across the upper 

deep. 

Those starry nights, those harbor lights, those girls 

with eager eyes 
Must watch and wait alone and late, till love deluded 

dies. 
Bare in the blinding furnace glare our heritage we 

know, 
Held fast upon one half-inch plate. A mile of sea 

below 
Drops black and sheer and deadly near. Grip tight 

the brands that burn, 
And seethe and sear, to banish fear; till faith and 

hope return. 

Though we to harlot ports have thrown our youth, our 

years away; 
And squandered more than was our own, we may be 

men to pay. 
Our drunken eyes by pain made wise, here wings of 

fire shall see; 



36 THe Coal Passers 

That veil a shrine where halos shine, where high 

archangels be. 
Not all of us shall sink to shame ; my brothers born to 

strife, 
The wrestle of the winds and flame; the firing line of 

life. 

New York, 12' 9 '03. 



THE LINER 

WHEN the world in the womb of the midnight 
weighed the High God moulded me. 
And He fined my lines to a scale He made or e'er was 

air or sea; 
Or harbors or ocean lanes He laid on the chart of a 
world to be. 

When He breathed on the void with the breath of life, 

e'er He quickened the soul of man; 
E'er He whetted His will as one whets a knife; while 

the lava rivers ran ; 
The shell of my hull in His hills He hid till the iron 

years began. 

Out of His spirit's treasuries His dauntless captains 

came. 
Out of His hoards on the mountainside His miners 

fed the flame. 
From the bridal red of coal and steel I sped His tides 

to tame. 

Man that hath bridled and saddled me with a harness 

soft of steam; 
Rides through the riot of wind and sea where the 

breakers roll abeam; 
Spurs through the midnight's mystery while the stars 

his sign-posts gleam. 

37 



38 THe Liner 

He has filled me with force, and the food that slays 

famine in foreign lands. 
He has set me my course that no storm delays. On 

my ice bound bridge he stands. 
Like a foam flecked horse my speed he sways ; and his 

soul my strength commands. 

He has filled me with fever, filth, and crime that breed 

my bowels within 
As they breed in His till the destined time when the 

judgments black begin; 
And the germ of the stagnant steerage slime is the seed 

of a nation's sin. 

Laughter of children, lilt of song, and the prayer of 

love I freight, 
And the master builder's purpose strong, and failure 

desolate ; 
And the pilgrim hopes and fears that throng through 

the new world's water gate. 

And they pass and scatter like the spray, and day by 

day goes by. 
And night by night I plow my way through a gulf of 

starlit sky, 
Where planets lone one law obey; the same as you 

and I. 

Paris, 10' 14 '08. 



THE SANDS 

ONCE we were not. Wind and sea round the lava 
turned to stone 
Made the sea cliffs. Somberly boulders ground to 

pebbles shone. 
Scaled and screened and sifted, we in our multitudes 
were known. 

Round the shores of all the earth in a long, unbroken 

line 
In a girdle gem besprent, gleaming in the sun we shine, 
Smooth and hard and redolent of the fragrance of the 

brine. 

We make white her marriage bed where the passion 
of the tides 

Foaming mounts to meet the moon, over her remorse- 
less rides, 

Has its moment and departs; lies in wait, in shadow 
hides. 

We are earthworks. Where the rocks, castles breached 

by waves, must fall; 
We sustain their wildest shocks. Past our harbor 

bars they crawl. 
Sanctuary from the storm, refuge free we grant to all. 

39 



40 THe Sands 

We are snares, our shallows lie underneath the smiling 

sea; 
Lure the sailors till the sky changes, blackens; hard 

alee, 
Gleaming breakers surging high, shout our sirens' 

threnody. 

We are scourges where the dunes rank by rank 

devouring go; 
Shoreward march, and spoil the soil; lay your farms 

and houses low ; 
Till you plant the creeping things that slowly bind and 

break their blow. 

So we symbol all the souls of the multitudes that lie 
Near the last frontier of life and the strife of sea and 

sky. 
Time his tides around them rolls, day and night that 

pass them by. 

Small essential atoms all, daily stronger than before; 
For the mighty are made small; ever farther spreads 

the shore. 
Rocks and cliffs and mountains fall, and the sands 

are more and more. 

These ye have to reckon with who are masters here 

to-day. 
You must learn the primal law that both sands and 

souls obey; 
Learn the meaning of their march, senseless, slow, and 

grim and gray. 



THe Sands 41 

That you lay your forests low, bare your lives to storm 

and sand; 
Slum and mill by millions know. Hardly shall you 

understand 
Channels choke, and shallows grow, and dunes arise, 

and eat the land. 

Paris, 11' 20 '08. 



THE DERELICT 

ONCE I rose in freedom where the sunrise crowns 
the hills; 
Where in serried columns, rippling seaward race the 

rills; 
Where the voice of ocean through the pine trees calls 
and thrills. 

Then they felled and branded me and flayed my 

strength with steel; 
Forged the rusting fetters that my festered flesh must 

feel ; 
Fashioned bolt and plate and plank, and mast and 

spar and keel. 

I was thrust into the deep to float or founder there, 
Outcast of the endless streets where stars from heaven 

stare; 
Every rock a stumbling block, and every shoal a 

snare. 

Men have had their will with me while heaven's stars 

were white; 
Raped and robbed me of my youth and beauty and 

delight ; 
Fleeing from the wrath to come, have left me in the 

night. 

42 



The Derelict 43 

In the night I lie and lurk, derelict and black, 
Till I drift into the liner's fog-beleaguered track 
Till a thousand dive to death; and never one comes 
back. 

You shall build your lighthouses, chart and sound your 

seas. 
Still I spoil your argosies and bring you to your knees ; 
Still the ocean's waste infect with ruin and unease. 

Wanton, wasted, water logged, waiting for the day 
When the dark destroyer's shells shall shred my flesh 

away; 
When my bridegroom of the storm no longer shall 

delay. 

Sydney, 4' 5 '09. 



Ill— WOMEN 
MOTHERHOOD 

NOW is it springtime in a fruitful land. 
Heaven has drawn near to earth in April rain, 
Out of their close embrace the growth of grain, 
The flowers that on her face like flushes stand, 
The bridal whiteness of the orchard trees, 
The little leaves that whisper to the breeze, 
The new-born baby buds that bless the sun, 
The birds that sing of summer just begun, 
Of homes and households that are yet to be ; 
Are all around me, all akin in me. 

The south wind and the sunshine warm the blood, 
The scent of growing grass is strong and sweet, 
Through all the trees, all flowers that fleck my feet, 
The sap streams upward in a rising flood; 
The tide of spring that surges toward the sky, 
The sharp sweet thrill that flutters, strives to fly, 
That pulses fast, that beats beneath my heart 
Trying to tear this cage of flesh apart ; 
Of me shall soon be born a winged thing, 
A soul that seeks to soar; that dumb would sing. 

44 



MotKerHood 45 

To-day it sings in me beside the sea. 

I am a mouth that utters nature's word; 

The secret whisper in the midnight heard, 

Longing for life and love and liberty. 

I am fulfilled, my womanhood awake, 

Waxing like waves that swell before they break, 

Tossing aside their fading flowers of foam. 

Life by my heart hid, must you haste from home? 

Ah, but the flowers that fall beneath the frost! 

Soul of my soul, we shall not all be lost. 

5. 5. Bremen, 7' 24 '05. 



THE INCOMMENSURABLE 

OUR life is the river of space. 
And death is the brink of the falls 
Where the star drift is foam on its face. 
And time is a shadow that crawls. 

And our love is our ultimate breath ; 
The throb of two hearts through the void; 
The long sigh in the silence of death 
Till the fetters of flesh are destroyed. 

Can you measure the round of the sky? 
Can you reckon the race of the sun? 
Can you fathom the depth of the eye 
That has mirrored creation in one? 

Have you found her, the motive of life, 
And the symphony's holiest theme? 
The beloved, the mother, the wife; 
And the real that remains from the dream? 

Though the planets are parcelled and weighed 
By your wit ; and the walls of the heart 
By your scalpel; though talons of trade 
Tear the bowels of the mountains apart : 
46 



THe Incommensurable 47 

All your labors are houses of sand, 
Such as children have built by the sea. 
All our arts but as bubbles expand, 
And have ceased while beginning to be. 

All our works are as grains of the sand, 
All our words as the gleam of the snow. 
We who sorrow alone understand. 
You must lose her, and find her, and know. 

New York, 12' 2 '04. 



THE ULTIMATE 

BETTER you know yourself now, knowing her ; 
Feeling the brute from its lair in you stir, 
Leap to its mate ; and unleashed like its prey 
Sated and senseless, lie sleeping till day. 

Waking you looked at her, alien and strange, 
Fetter of flesh for your soul that must range; 
Shrank from her, hated her. Sudden she smiled. 
She was an animal changed to a child. 

Yes, she is animal yet most of all. 
Nature that mothers and nurses us; small, 
Shallow, inscrutable, furtive, and sly; 
Instinct that lies while her eyes meet your eye. 

There she lies nude in her litter of lace ; 
Childish and crude, and your freedom's disgrace. 
With her you sounded the depths. Shall you rise? 
She is a soul in her body's disguise. 

Back to the primitive nature to-day 
Strong in you summons you. Take her away. 
Turn to the mountains. Earn slumber like lead; 
Nerves that have tortured you dormant and dead. 

4 8 



THe Ultimate 49 

Climb with her. Struggle o'er rock-lectge and shelf. 
Helping her grow with her stronger yourself. 
Pause for the vistas, drink deep of the air. 
Gather her flowers where each is a prayer. 

Strive with her. Thrive with her, patient and wise, 
Faithful, enduring, and fitter to rise. 
You were her guide. Will you hinder or aid 
Now that her soul has the summit assayed? 

This is your ultimate; barriers and bars, 
Rounds in its ladder like children and stars. 

Paris, 12' 15 '09. 



THE MOTHER 

HER world within her arms she holds 
Heart to her heart, the life to be; 
From her own flesh an image moulds; 
In infant eyes she seeks to see 
The best of all that gave her birth, 
Mirrors of heaven made on earth. 

The mysteries of ages past 
Have made her Sybil, prophetess. 
She scans the future's purpose vast 
In this her son. To-day's caress 
While Cosmos halts to question here 
Is Delphic portent — smile or tear. 

Oh, Mother, may thine arms be strong! 
Weigh love with justice. Even so 
A little moment, not for long, 
Thine is the balance, weal or woe. 
And tremble not to take the scales; 
For by thy faith he wins or fails. 

New York, 3' 4 '02. 



50 



THE LIFE CLASS 

PAST wasted color splashed on grimy walls 
Like sunset hues, or fires that flare at dawn 
Through life's gray monotone, the eye is drawn 
To the white central shape that voiceless calls. 

For here is Woman waiting pale and still, 
Essential, silent, stripped of vanity, 
Bare to the soul that has the eyes to see, 
The strength and weakness that within her thrill. 

Look well artist. Balance light and shade, 
Lend the bare breast a prophet's tenderness, 
Till children nestle there. Express no less 
The flesh superb that nature naked made, 

Like some white pedestal that shall enthrone 
A soul new risen to the lips and eyes. 
Some street drab, drifted here, in dumb surmise 
Seeing your likeness, may fulfill her own. 

She stands the symbol of her sisters all; 
Mother and wife and wanton, child and saint; 
Into man's hands ordained to teach or taint, 
Whether his art on earth be great or small. 

51 



52 



The Life Class 

Not all the honors that his peers confer ; 
Wisdom, achievement, riches, fame, command; 
Shall test the soul that is to fall or stand; 
As what he makes or fails to make of her. 

Paris, 4' 28 '08. 



THE CAT 

AIN'T women cats? They 's kittens when they 's 
small. 
That 's evolution. When they 's grown most all 
Are much the same. They call each other so. 
Sometimes the truth by instinct like they know. 
They yawn, and lick their fur, and trim their duds, 
And when you stroke them right they 're smooth as 

suds. 
And when you stroke them wrong it ain't no joke. 
They 'd rather have that though than ne'er a stroke. 
They stretch and purr, and sidle round and creep 
Into your lap and cuddle, go to sleep, 
When you don't want them much. And when you do 
It takes a year to coax them back to you. 
Lord, how they scratch. They 's the most cruel thing 
To mice and kids they hate. And when they sing — 
Me to the timber tall ! That 's common ones. 
The best, there 's nothing better all God's suns 
Have ever shone on or shall ever see; 
One in a million — maybe two or three. 
And how they hate each other, when the men 
Won't go round right. That 's nature's plan again. 
Give them a house and babies of their own, 
A master who will let them well alone, 

53 



54 TKe Cat 

But not too long ; they 're almost happy till 
He has to scare them. Let them lap their fill 
Till their fur shines and others envy them ; 
Give them a chance their sisters to condemn 
For what they want themselves ; they '11 love you so. 
And in their heart of hearts this truth they know. 
I 'm one myself. That 's why I 'm bound to say 
We always have to give ourselves away. 

Paris, 12' 2 '08. 



THE MIRROR 

THIS is the empty room where once she dwelt 
Before she went away, 
This is the glass that her soft breath has felt 
Upon it day by day. 

This is the frame that held her portrait dear, 
Too perfect long to last. 
So when I held her closest, warm and near 
Into the void she passed. 

There is an empty chamber in my heart, 
Silent and clean and cold, 
And there when twilight falls I walk apart 
There for an hour grown old. 

There is a mirror there, wherein she stands 
A spirit pale and dim, 
Lifting to me in silence tender hands 
Held fast by seraphim. 

Earth in its shifting orbit sees the sun 
Fulfill the shades of night. 
Another here shall do what she has done, 
Let in new air and light. 

55 



56 THe Mirror 

Children shall come and stand where once she stood 
Where children long ago 

When to our fathers life and love seemed good, 
Learned wistful lips to know. 

But in the land beyond the mirror's gates, 
Beyond its bars of air, 

There is a room wherein she smiles and waits 
Forever first and fair. 

Paris, 4' 14 '08. 



DUST DEVILS (LES MONDAINES) 

WE have no breath to say one word. We have no 
time. But still we must. 
To-day our shallow souls are stirred though we are 

children of the dust. 
To-day there came a circling gust of winds that sweep 

to wider things, 
To higher, truer too we trust; and on its eddies we 
have wings. 

And yet we know it cannot last. We have no hope 

to stir and save. 
We have forgotten all the past, the sense of loss the 

parting gave. 
We have no faith. We cannot see. There may be 

stars but we are blind . 
We have no love. Eternity may warm our ashes 

unresigned. 

But we are old and we are cold, unresting ghosts of 
days gone by; 

Seraglio slaves our mothers sold for man's delight to 
dance and die. 

Our sinful sisters walk the streets. We have no 
strength, no skill to sin. 

In them the world's red life blood beats, and love re- 
demption sore may win. 

57 



58 Dust Devils (Les Mondaines) 

But we are passionless and pale or flushed with sunset's 

fitful glow. 
And in the night we fade and fail. The depths of life 

we never know. 
We see the children of our friends, we clasp them close. 

They never smile. 
They shun our kisses. So it ends, the flame that 

flickered for a while. 

For we are dead. And yet we bear contagion to the 

world around; 
The dust whose clouds obscure the air, that lies a 

blight upon the ground, 
That blinds the eyes, that color steals and light and 

truth from living things, 
That chokes the throat, that clogs the wheels, that far 

and wide pollution flings. 

For wheels must turn, and fires must burn, and dust 
and ashes we are made, 

And seeds of death, that men may learn in us them- 
selves are most betrayed; 

That love and sorrow, fire and tears might mould our 
clay to life again, 

Who line the highway of the years and for our waking 
wait in vain. 

And other women envied us. They taught their 

daughters such as we 
Are rich and rare and meritous. And as we were they 

strove to be. 



D\jst Devils (Les Mondaines) 59 

Forbear and spare. Our vanity is made the limbo of 

our haste, 
They will not hear. They cannot see the wind that 

whirls along the waste. 

And we must dance with it to-day. But if one other 

wakes again 
Who hears our prayer, and turns away; we have not 

lived and died in vain. 

Paris, 12' 5 *o8. 



THE HILLTOP 

THERE is a hilltop where I go 
When evening turns to afterglow, 
And broken wracks and wrecks of day 
Into the darkness drift away. 
Salt blows the wind there from the sea 
x\nd on its breath she comes to me. 

There is a hilltop of the morn 
Where Bethlehem each day reborn 
Thrones its Madonna. At her shrine 
I offer gifts. And wings divine, 
And winds of heaven worship there, 
And kings and shepherds meet in prayer. 

There is a hilltop of the night, 
Where heaven's myriad trails of light 
Exalt their vistas wide and far, 
And lure the soul from star to star; 
Where moonlit pools of silver sheen 
Ripple and purge my passion clean. 

There is a hilltop of the noon 
Where life in flood is lapped in June, 
Prone on the scented turf I lie 
And count our castles in the sky 
And watch the clouds slow blossoming 
Unfolding all the years shall bring. 
60 






The Hilltop 6 1 

There is a hilltop of the heart 

And while she dreams and prays apart; 

Her eyes have caught the sunrise there, 

And twilight tangled in her hair 

Is waiting till I climb that hill, 

And hearts throb loud, though lips are still. 

Auckland, 3' 26 '09. 



LOVE LETTERS OF A MOTHER, VII 

TO-DAY my baby learned to walk alone. 
Each little step he staggered from my arms 
Into his future's fortunes, far, unknown, 
Was dogged by furtive fears and faint alarms 
That ghostlike trooped before him and behind; 
That dimmed his smile with tears that left me blind. 

I had so loved the life that all was mine, 
That waked within me quickened like a flame; 
That leapt to light through pain's red flare divine, 
That round about my breast devouring came, 
Drawing from me immortal life and heat: 
Dear little lips with kisses piercing sweet. 

Now is he weaned and walks, and all goes well. 

Already be begins his baby words. 

His own life's story tries to all to tell 

In accents sweeter than the song of birds. 

And through my tears my heart his laughter hears 

And treasures all against the tyrant years. 

Life is too frail to turn its pages back. 
So we must find them fairest once for all ; 
Snatch for to-day lest we to-morrow lack. 
He must go forth to struggle, stand or fall. 
Let me be nearest, dearest by thy side 
Until the unveiled future brings its bride. 

New York, 7' 12 '05. 
62 



IV— SCIENCE 
WIRELESS 

WE listen to new oracles across the darkest night, 
Interpreting the void to those that may not 
read aright. 
We see the bottled lightning seethe in serried Leyden 

jars ; 
The rapid fire that crashes, hear through strange sym- 
phonic bars. 

We know that other instruments are tuned to answer 

ours; 
Beyond the bounds of mortal sense a host of allied 

powers 
March on to beat the blackness back; and matter's 

brutal odds 
Thrill to the martial music of men and demigods. 

Across the wrath of oceans, round the rocks that rend 

and slay 
The spars lift up their signals like hands upraised to 

pray. 
Unseen and unsolicited they make their message 

known. 
And men that seek an unknown God come closer to 

their own. 

63 



64 "Wireless 

The fleshless fingers beckon. They baffle fog and 

storm, 
The letters of infinity's mute alphabet they form, 
While voiceless angels silent throng, for mortal hearing 

seek 
Of Him who to His blind gives sight and makes His 

dumb to speak. 

Paris, 7' 1 8 '08. 



THE X-RAYS 

YOU love her better than your life, 
And now the hour has come. 
Her tender flesh shall feel the knife, 
Your throttled heart be dumb. 

You see the clotted seeds of death 
Inside her, this alone. 
The pulse grows faint. The vital breath 
Eludes its cage of bone. 

And that grim skeleton that all 
Our strength and beauty bears 
Essential looms. The flesh its thrall 
Each second thinner wears. 

Another surgeon's hand shall lay 
The inner tissues bare. 
With bleeding lips you strive to pray 
Who say, "There is no prayer." 

This you believe. We feel and see 
(Ye blind that lead the blind) 
Though life to-morrow may not be 
When death leaves dust behind. 

5] &5 



66 THe X-Rays 

New stars unborn you demonstrate 
Beyond our range of sight. 
New germs of life's last ultimate 
Your lenses bring to light. 

Your spirit sickens. Toil and hope 
For science nears its goal. 
The mind shall find its microscope, 
New X-rays save the soul. 

Paris, 12' 19 '09. 



ANTITOXINE 

THIS is the secret that nature concealed; 
Who out of ether her elements wrought, 
Out of them mind; till to-day has revealed 
Part of the purpose of infinite thought. 

Pharaohs and priests with their Pyramids passed, 
Monarchs, inquisitors blind led the blind. 
Man tore the scales from his eyes, and at last 
Sees himself fit their resultant to find. 

Under the test tube a colorless flame 
Rises like science transforming the race. 
Doubt and disease and decadence and shame 
Fail, and for larger fruition make place. 

Germ and bacillus are marshalled and scanned, 
Microbes benign are enlisted to serve, 
March and assault at the Master's command, 
Fortify faltering sinew and nerve. 

Death wavers back; and life's columns advance. 
Powers of darkness from sick bed and slum, 
Turn to retreat ; and the world from its trance 
Wakes and is strong. And each day adds its sum. 

67 



68 Antitoxine 

Life's true elixir the chemist has found. 
Lifting his test tube in silence he stands ; 
Knows that a Greater environs him round, 
Life in solution upraised in His hands. 

New York, 8' 7 '09. 



RADIUM 

LIFE on this planet is death and decay. 
The desert grows greater, the air wastes away. 
Laughter and love and their infinite cost 
Dwindle and fail till the ultimate frost. 

Life in each one of us runs to its end. 

Age is a desert, the shadows descend. 

Cold grow the heart and its hopes until death 

Wipes from our lips the last measure of breath. 

Farther the frost line shall creep from the poles, 
Doubt and disaster shall deaden your souls. 
Coal-fields are wasted. The lava is cold. 
Gorged on earth's vitals the race has grown old. 

Spirits decay, and our millions are more. 
We have forgotten to pray and adore. 
Honor is lost or is held at a price. 
Virtue is vain and the victim of vice. 

We are degenerate, false and unfit, 
Millions that race to the verge of the pit; 
Blinded, stampeded, to blackness we go, 
Never an echo is heard from below. 

69 



7° R>adi\im 

Yet the unfit shall its fitness evolve. 
Enters a factor our problems to solve. 
Elements lapse; from their wreck is descried 
Radium stronger than tempest and tide. 

Out of the grave is salvation's rebirth ; 
Love that is vital, outliving the earth; 
Light, heat and power that shall pierce through the 

void; 
Mind that shall mount, though the stars be destroyed. 

Failures and falls are our ladder through space; 
Death the dark handicap, life the long race. 

Paris, 12' 20 '09. 



THE LABORATORY 

ABSCISSA and coordinate on paper ruled we plot 
and chart ; 
The atom's soul substantiate ; all life's partitions tear 

apart. 
We focus down our microscope — a hair's breadth the 

horizon fills — 
In fragile test tubes blindly grope for life that through 
the ether thrills. 

We build our castles in the sand against the rising of 

the sea. 
Our theories, our life works, stand one moment; then 

they cease to be. 
We set our marks and some remain, to show the limits 

of its flow. 
To-morrow shall some better brain the reasons for our 

error know. 

Some truths essential holding yet, the digits of the 
problem vast, 

The letters of life's alphabet, we stir one step beyond 
the past. 

The deeper sense of nature's word, the scope of quanti- 
ties unknown, 

Of formulas unseen, unheard; we miss, we may not 
make our own. 

But science long in patience toils, content to ponder, 
sift and scan 

71 



7 2 The Laboratory 

The power whose purpose nothing foils, the elemental 
rise of man ; 

The growth of germs in chaos born that solar fires 
unseared behold; 

Unchilled shall death and darkness scorn, and inter- 
planetary cold. 

The great equation clearer frames; such modes of 

matter treated thus 
By older or by later names make the same minus still 

or plus. 
Such forms of forces focussed so the same resultant 

always yield. 
So tides must turn and rivers flow till the soul's secrets 

stand revealed. 

These are the rinsings of the glass, the droppings from 

the slow retort. 
So clouds condense and nations pass, the crystal 

forms, our brains report. 
Untrained assistants pencils seize, fallen and dull and 

broken; so 
They calculate infinities and add their cyphers to the 

row. 

The bubble breaks, the life is lost. O fool and slow 

of heart and blind! 
That life that all earth's aeons cost has gone its larger 

life to find. 
The rarer essence, redistilled, sublimed shall mount to 

larger air, 
The Master Chemist so has willed. His inner room 

awaits us there. 

Paris, 12' 29 '08. 



THE OBSERVATORY 

SNOWFLAKES in the night, you think them, 
poet? 
Planets blossom nightly in your vision? 
At your highest range you seem to see them 
Serried hosts of heaven and signal beacons? 
I have learned the stars, a lifetime, slowly; 
Scanned them, weighed them, charted out their 

courses ; 
Made my spectroscope a surgeon's scalpel, 
Analyzed their thin red lines, their life blood; 
Vivisected them, and learned their secrets. 

" Man, I tell you, they 're eternal digits 

On the great big blackboard of the midnight, 

Where the Purpose of all evolution 

Works His mighty problems out forever. 

And the mind of man informs His fingers, 

Mounts to meet His mind, and shares His life-work. 

"Planets pass and agonize for ages, 
Die, and are reborn again forever. 
So the soul of man that is immortal 
Suffers change, survives, and out of chaos 
Learns the elemental law of living 

73 



74 THe Observatory- 

Discipline through struggle. — And the midnight 
Slowly grows more clear. Another factor 
Simplifies; another vista opens. 
Lad, to-night, I chart a moon of Neptune 
Found by me an hour before you entered. 
Very likely we shall read to-morrow 
That some German saw it first. So be it. 
Does it matter, so the star is charted?" 

New York, 2' 12' 1910. 



THE CONSULTING ROOM 

THIS is our last confessional. The rest have we 
outgrown. 
And here our brothers who have sinned to judgment 

go alone. 
In shadow and in silence till someone coughs, they 

wait, 
They turn the tattered pages and the pictures out of 

date 
Of magazines scarce six months old, so fast we grow 

to-day. 
Some see the whole world's records there. Some 

shiver, try to pray. 

The black door opens. One appears, the judge of » 

laws divine 
You have transgressed. Your fellow sinners answer 

to his sign. 
White cheeks grow whiter. So you wait. Your turn 

has come at last 
And now the trembling present tries to answer for the 

past. 
He puts his question with his lips. His wise eyes read 

you through 
Before you speak. His strong hands hold a probe, and 

your heart too. 

You see another rise in turn. You stiffen, try to 

smile. 
A woman weeps in silence. You can pity her awhile. 

75 



76 THe Consulting Room 

A child sobs loud. You softly curse. You start. 

You hear a groan, 
And panic comes. You pay your shot. You want 

to be alone. 
You hail a cab, steal through your house; and now at 

last you face 
Your private bar of judgment in the old familiar place. 

Here is the study. Here the books you read, believed 
in youth, 

When worlds were yours to win; and here her picture, 
God's best truth. 

Alive or dead it matters not. You may not meet her 
there. 

Here you shall shrink, shall hate her. Could she for- 
ever care? 

Five years? Or ten at most? You hear your sen- 
tence. Prisoned here 

Scarce sixty days. In Arizona, possibly a year. 

You 're ordered south. Man can't you see ! Whether 

you live or die 
You go where He shall send you, who shall hold you, 

hand and eye. 
No priest can damn your soul to-day. No doctor's 

word can kill. 
You have your fraction's fighting chance; indomitable 

will. 
If you can capture life again, think you His purpose 

fails 
Who tests you, rests you, tests you, till your soul 

grown strong prevails? 

Paris, 12' 12 '08. 



THE UPLIFT 

YES the world is worse and better both, to-day 
than long ago. 
Species vary. Vice and virtue more evolved and fitter 

grow 
For the one primordial purpose. Some revert to type, 

but all 
Are not wasted, unconsidered, howsoever slight and 
small. 

Long ago men told the story of the lost Atlantis land 
Sunk in wrath for sin transcendent, since they could 

not understand 
That the purpose is not human, that its will is not as 

ours. 
Sin and death like pain and slumber are its strong 

subservient powers. 

Long ago the lava mountains started from the ocean's 

plain, 
Some to stand in island summits, some to sink from 

sight again. 
Aeons passed. And coral polyps died and with their 

bones prepared 
Foothold for new generations that their labor blindly 

shared. 

77 



78 The Uplift 

Ages passed. They ringed the mountain till the 

atoll raised its reef. 
Sand was powdered. Birds brought seeds. From 

rotting mosses frond and leaf 
Sprang to life. The palm trees' rustle down the 

tradewind's courses ran 
Waiting, calling, night and morning till a home was 

made for man. 

Law unchanging sank an island, raised another in- 
stantly. 

Earthquake travail tore the planet; land was lifted 
from the sea. 

Polyps toiled, and life subaqueous hurled through 
chaos blindly eyed 

Light and sky it was not made for, saw its God's new 
face and died. 



Ages passed. To-day we suffer, strive, and die in 

unsuccess ; 
Not the tenth submerged alone, but all whose flame of 

life grows less. 
Nations pass and form a foothold for the race, and life 

shall grow 
Slowly, surely, up to heaven though the mountains be 

brought low. 

Nearer light we form this nation. Variation has 

attained 
Newer types and larger, freer; corals bloodshot 

branched and brained. 






The Uplift 79 

Comes or stays the storm, the earthquake; rending, 

slaying, surely we 
Serve the race that rises slowly like the coral from the 

sea. 

Island life is still before us. Wider vistas wait our 

eyes. 
Mountain-tops of light whose beacons star the oceans 

of the skies. 

Paris , 12' 3 'o8. 



THE FRONTIERSMEN 

YOU say the days of pioneers are past, the last 
frontier is lost, is wiped away; 
That earth is fettered fast in steel at last; life grows 

more tame and cruel every day; 
That Drake and Raleigh's work on earth is done, that 

Boone and Crockett's like no more we breed; 
To younger planets nearer to the sun they have gone 

on on trails untrod to bleed. 
It may be so with them. It is not so with us their 

father's sons who usher in 
The noonday of the race. The fairest hours for fight- 
ing men and pioneers begin. 
Earth grows more crowded daily. Greater odds are 

ours to count, to weigh, to charge, to rout, 
To blaze our trails through. In our cities' slums our 

pathfinders through savagery shall scout, 
We felled the forest once and laid it low. We swept 

its lurking perils from our path. 
We loosed the floods. To-day till trees shall grow we 

must rear up new walls against their wrath. 
We must drive back the desert, stem the seas. Our 

engineers go pioneering still. 
Our surgeons war with danger and disease. They 

reinforce the long beleaguered will. 
80 



THe Frontiersmen 81 

Life has come near its limits on one plane. But life 

that never pauses learns to rise. 
Skyscraper floors our footing find again. Our air- 
ships seek the frontiers of the skies. 
We must dig deeper. In our darkest mines, in depths 

below the tenth submerged we hear 
Rumors of fire damp. In these close confines is born 

the master courage kin to fear. 
We run and leap. The records still go down. We 

train; the body's limits still extend. 
We make machines more subtle, swift, and strong; 

our powers are multiplied without an end. 
We roll up riches till our money kings are stronger 

than the emperors of old; 
Nor lands nor seas their frontiers, stronger things, the 

whole world's hunger and its lust for gold. 
Earth 's our arena. So our bodies strive. Fit to sur- 
vive our stronger sons are born, 
And fairer daughters. Love is still alive. His lists 

are wide; his barriers night and morn. 
The mind's dominions widen. Furthest stars are 

scanned and weighed. Our eyes adventure there. 
The chemist's skill unlocks the atom's bars. The 

lonely scouts of science sweep the air. 
They go beyond. They tread the trails of space. 

They war with germs without us and within. 
They shall dissect the nerve, the brain, the soul. They 

prove disease and madness one with sin. 
They hypnotize the dull subconscious will, extend its 

borders, and record its laws. 
So shall the master healers of mankind awake the 

world that slumbers to the cause 



82 THe Frontiersmen 

We all must fight for; scout and pioneer, painter clear- 
eyed, and singer sounding true. 

Teacher and preacher; till the last frontier our spirits 
near, and heaven is ours to view. 

Paris, 12' 10 '09. 



THE CHAIR 

YOU shall no longer stand among your fellow men. 
And all your hands from life have wrung lies 

shrunken then 
To that lone place beside its board, the seat of horror 

where 
The headman is your host and lord. They strap you 

to the chair, 
From shrinking flesh the wrappings roll, the cold 

electrodes lay, 
Like serpents' coils that crush your soul. You seem 

to swoon away. — 
This is our Moloch's altar grim, since blood for blood 

still cries, 
And since your eyes untaught were dim you are our 

sacrifice, 
Our hostage that we dare to rack, our scapegoat cast 
Into the pit whence none comes back. Night's wilder- 
ness at last 
Shall be more kind to you than us, who slowly day by 

day 
In slums and sweatshops murderous that profits pay, 
Your like by thousands doom to death. No shape of 

terror sits 
To still the shudders of your breath and soothe the 

soul that flits. 
Death the old mother in her arms shall clasp you till 
Your spirit rests from life's alarms and slumbers still. 

Paris, ii' ii '08. 
83 



V— THE CITY 

MIDNIGHT— THE WAITING-ROOM— JERSEY 
CITY 

THIS is the vestibule. A continent 
Opens outside these westward swinging doors. 
Ever the sound of footsteps on the floors 
Quickens and swells. Anon the wave is spent. 

Rank after rank arisen over seas 
Along the foreshore black of night they break. 
Rank after rank of soldiers half awake 
They march to make to-morrow's destinies. 

Some halt. Some pace like restless sentinels. 
And through the stormy clangor of the trains 
A mother lulls her babe in tender strains. 
And unawares the whole world's secret tells. 

New York, 7' 11 '03. 



THE SKYSCRAPERS 

WHEN earth outgrew her limits she made a 
mountain range. 
She drew her lines of cleavage. She suffered stress 

and change. 
She raised her floods of lava high until the snow-peaks 

rose 
To flash the signals of the sky; its dawns and after- 
glows. 

We have no eyes to see them, who crowd the market 

place. 
But the same long cosmic pressure is strong to mould 

the race. 
And every wave and every train that rolls o'er land 

and sea 
Evokes a folk migration to a land of liberty. 

There was neither space nor grace for them in the 

cities old of men, 
Their lords devoured their substance. They took the 

trail again. 
And while they come to swell the crowd that struggles 

here to rise 
Above their Babel hoarse and loud these towers assail 

the skies. 

85 



86 THe Skyscrapers 

They are the spars we raise to-day of mighty scaffold- 
ing. 

They are the piers unfinished of to-morrow that shall 
bring 

Order at last from chaos ; out of the struggle blind 

A vision of the purpose that our building has designed. 

They have grown with the rising of the race, like the 

growth of trees and grain, 
That stakes its claim in the heart of space. Sorrow 

and toil and pain, 
Its aspirations high and prayers, have raised them here 

to be 
The foot rules of its will that dares to scale infinity. 

Here where the faults are focussed the lava surges 

through. 
Out of the soul's corruption the spirit builds anew 
Beneath the lifted ladders where the workmen slowly 

climb, 
The broad and strong foundations of a city more 

sublime. 

New York, 9' 10 '09. 



THE HIGHWAY 

LIFE is motion, never ending pilgrimage through 
paths of space. 
Here the feet of men forgotten trod the trail that leads 

the race 
Past these lights to make the stars its milestones 
towards its dwelling-place. 

All the shadows of the city wake to watch the arc lights 

blaze 
Where Broadway is made a mirror of a myriad Milky 

Ways. 
Here the heart of all the heavens beats on earth while 

dawn delays. 

Here a nebula is lucent. Millions of its atoms swarm 
Where the nodule of a nation finds its evanescent 

form. 
Here the soul that is eternal lights a fire its flesh to 

warm. 

Endless atoms in their orbits, endless germs of life, and 
light 

Swirl and form a flaming vortex where each arc light's 
beams are bright. 

Endless eyes that wake to watch them out of inter- 
stellar night, 

87 



88 The Highway 

Gaze unseeing; on unending errands through creation 

go. 
Men that chart the curves of ions, life's electrons learn 

to know, 
Blind their brothers in the blackness where they hurtle 

to and fro. 

Life is light that flames, and falling flows through 

space in fiery waves. 
Stars shine here that died when first the Pharaohs 

piled their granite graves. 
Here the life of ancient Egypt makes to-day its lords 

and slaves. 

Life is rhythm, the measured marching of the armies 
of the dead 

Down the trail that all must follow through the dark- 
ness far ahead. 

Here they made it hard, enduring, underneath the 
ages' tread. 

Here the crowding millions marching, countermarch- 
ing faster past 

Camps and cities, plant their torches on a frontier 
dark and vast ; 

Build Life's road, make straight His way, until His 
triumph comes at last. 

New York, 7' 7 '09. 



HERALD SQUARE 

YOU who have felt the pressure and made good, 
Who cold and hungry heard the presses thunder ; 
And watched with eyes that little understood, 
Sheet after sheet show white, and double under; 
And saw beside you there some face of wood, 
Some well-clad idler's stare of vacant wonder; 

Clubman, collegian, child or priest or maid: 
Have you not envied them their careless faces, 
Their lives untried, untainted, unafraid; 
Their linen white? These are the printless spaces, 
The margins for your mark. His ink may fade, 
God's sheet moves on. You would not change your 
places. 

New York, 6' 8 '06. 



89 



THE FACTORY WHISTLES 

THE night is rent by sudden hoarse alarms. 
The dawn has barely tinged the winter skies 
Where trails of smoke from grimy chimneys rise 
When labor's bugles call a world to arms. 

Through squalid streets the army takes its way, 
Childhood and age are sad together there, 
No thrill of hope the stolid faces wear, 
As bleak before them breaks the barren day. 

They wage a hopeless war without redress. 
Their leaders false, they fight not for their own. 
Delight and hours of ease they have not known. 
Still to the strife their columns onward press. 

New York, 5' 16 '99. 



90 



THE ARENA 

THEY have raised the seats of the mighty around 
the City Hall 
Where Nero sits in office and taxes great and small. 
And the nation's vast arena around the place is ranged, 
For we are the heirs of the Romans. In little are we 
changed. 

Bread and the circus crying, the multitudes begin 
To fill these tiers at daybreak. And still for those 

that win 
We shout and we shoulder nearer, and still turn down 

our thumbs 
And doom to death the vanquished. And the sound 

of our shouting comes 
From the curb where we crowd the closest to the last 

skyscraper's floor, 
And the millionaires' high altar of the wealth we all 

adore. 

Day after day when sunset has glorified the west 
We go our ways unseeing, and we win us little rest. 
With the lusts of place and mastery and money still 

we strive: 
These are the beasts we battle with to save our souls 

alive. 

91 



92 THe -Arena 

Year after year the springtime awakens earth from 

sleep : 
And the world grows warm with summer while our 

hard won hoards we keep. 
And our hearts grow hard and colder. And the flowers 

and the children's smiles, 
And the dreams that we dreamed in boyhood grow 

dim. And the weary miles 
Of life's hard highway lengthen. No other goal we 

know 
But the gate of the great arena, and the seat in the 

highest row. 

Yet are there visions that gleam awhile down the 

vistas gray of years, 
Strains of some vagrant music that summon unshed 

tears, 
Faces seen on a ferry like the loves that might not be, 
Wind through the office window with its word of the 

open sea. 

We who must die salute Thee, Lord of the lives of all. 
We are Thy gladiators, Thy purpose holds in thrall. 
Nearer we march each morning from our prison to the 

night 
When we hear the end of the shouting and we sink in 

the last grim fight. 
And the moon looks down at midnight on a crater 

bare and cold; 
Hard as our hearts that have builded it, and as sad 

and stern and old. 

Paris, ii' ii '08. 



THE CRUCIBLE 

HERE by the borders of the sea and land, 
The fingers of an everlasting hand 
Have traced these streets like furrows in the sand. 

The heat and burden of the day are done. 

Out of the west the embers of the sun 

Are raked; unchecked the streams of pleasure run. 

A crucible of molten life is spilled 

Upon the pavement; every mould is filled, 

And souls inert to sudden heat are thrilled. 

The arc lights glimmer in a flaming line, 
At playhouse portals lurid letters shine, 
And jewels gleam like bubbles born of wine, 

These are but sparks that fleck the surface. Slow, 
Deep in the shadows, in the slag below, 
Hardens and cools the crust of want and woe. 

Doubt and distress and poverty and pain, 

Fear and despair and shame that sears the brain, 

All fused to fever heat, grow cold again. 

In the cool silence of His hours of sleep 
He shapes our prayers, the trysts that lovers keep, 
Triumphs and trials, and tears that women weep. 

93 



94 THe Crucible 

Tempered in sorrow, tested not for long, 

Under the sledges of His shapes of wrong" x 

In night's black smithy shall His steel grow strong. 

This day a million mortals marred, shall He 
Fashion His fragment of eternity 
Into the pattern of the days to be. 

New York, 9' 14 '07. 



THE SWITCH YARD 

OUT of the glimmer of arc lights and spaces of 
shade, 
Far on the frontier the city has won from the dark, 
Rails in the moonlight in ribbons of silver are laid, 
Eyes that are watchful the loom of the switch yard 

shall mark, 
Ears that are keen to its music shall hark. 

Red, green and gold are the signals that mark the 

design. 
Black is the ground where the work of the weaver is 

spread. 
Bright in the night is the glittering length of the line, 
Swiftly and smoothly and strongly the shuttles are 

sped 
Bringing and braiding and breaking the thread. 

Clicking of switches and resonant rolling of wheels 
Mix in the midnight with stifled escape of the steam. 
Down the long siding a shadowed shape silently steals, 
Sudden it checks; and the gride of the brakes is a 

scream, 
The sound of a rent in the stuff of the dream. 

95 



96 THe Switch. Yard 

Stars in their courses in switch yards of uttermost 
space, 

Thrills in the ether that galaxies, systems, obey 

Meshes immortal of motion and matter to trace; 

Feel as they reel and they race down Heaven's per- 
manent way 

Past the tall signal tower holding the void in survey. 

New York, 2' 10 '04. 



THE MORAINE 

LOOK down love from the Bridge's height 
And see the buildings piled below, 
A heap of pebbles in the night 
Where stars like fireflies come and go. 

Here by the border of the sea 
Where life has left its last moraine, 
The soul of man eternally 
Resigns its pleasure and its pain. 

The glacier glides into the deep, 

An endless river of the years, 

From the far mountains where they sleep 

Who first begot our hopes and fears. 

Cave-man, Crusader, scientist, 
They pass as pass the centuries; 
And teach these stones to still persist 
To tally time's infinities. 

What does it all mean? Aeons dear 
Have left Manhattan here to-day 
That we might meet. Our home is here 
To share with others while we may. 

New York, 8' 29 '09. 



97 



THE CLOCK IN THE AIR 

HIGH on Manhattan's tallest tower 
The clock keeps watch and tells the hour. 
The chimes ring out their reveille. 
The city wakes, and turns to see 
Its campanile's shaft of white 
Against the sunrise. All the night 
It points its finger at the sky. 

All day the multitudes march by ; 
While like a skylark's song there falls 
To waken souls in prison walls 
To thoughts of meadows far away 
From dusty rooms that hide the day; 
Of snowpeaks and the open sea; 
Of all the city's symphony 
This note supernal and supreme 
Teaching the toilers how to dream. 

New York, 8' 25 '09. 



Q8 



VI— THE INNER LIFE 
THE CITY OF DREAMS 

IN the distant lands of dreaming 
Stands a city on a hillside 
High upborne by cloudy bulwarks, 
All by endless light illumined. 
Happy are its hopeless people 
For their fears are all forgotten. 
There they know nor noon nor daybreak, 
Sun nor shadow, care nor joy. 
Every night I climb that mountain, 
Seek and struggle unavailing, 
Scale the steep, assail the hillside, 
Baffled, blinded, faint and fail. 
Every hour there flit before me 
Visions of unearthly beauty, 
Gentle glances, smiles undying, 
Tears that time has kissed away. 
Sometimes standing in the gateway, 
Halting on the very threshold, 
Held enthralled by strains celestial, 
I have seemed to see her face ; 
Dreamed I kissed her garment's hem, 
Deemed she drifted ever nearer; 
Then the gates have crashed together 
On a waking world of pain. 

New York, 4' 21 '03. 



99 



THE DREAM 

LEST we forget the mountain peaks to-day, 
The fields of freedom where the children play, 
The fragrance of the garden dim with dawn, 
The years of youth that down to dust have gone; 
Here in the noonday's burden and its heat, 
The glare, the roar, the riot of the street ; 
Cloudlike the dream shall come, and in its shade 
Sad lips shall smile, faint hearts grow unafraid, 
Dull eyes shall brighten. There shall we forget 
Failures and frauds and custom's ceaseless threat, 
The barren triumphs and the tainted gold, 
Safety and honor crumbling in our hold. 
We will remember loveliness and peace, 
Beauty and joy that were not born to cease, 
Kisses of children pure as crystal springs, 
Voice of the spirit where a skylark sings, 
Sunset and snow, and forest, field and sea; 
Watchfires of stars that guard eternity; 
Heaven here on earth, ours in one woman's eyes. 
While these endure the dream that never dies 
Under our ashes stirs and flames anew. 
All these, our allies, ranged in long review 
While with the crowd we struggled, passed unseen. 
We have been blind, nor is our honor clean; 

ioo 



TKe Dream 



101 



We have known weakness, shame, unfaith and sin. 
Much have we wasted. Had we wiser been 
We should have less to win still ; less to share. 
Beyond the dream our own are waiting there. 

Sydney, 2' 28 '09. 



THE IDOL 

THOUGH you find her feet but clay, 
Though they trample on your heart, 
Kiss nor spurn them yet, but pray 
They may learn to play their part, 
Strive to find for them the way. 

Take your idol, raise her high. 
Blend her with your best ideal, 
Let her forehead feel the sky 
Though the rest of her be real. 
Kneel and toil and testify. 

This is she that might have been, 
Such am I and by her grace, 
Scourged by failure, folly, sin ; 
In the promise of her face 
Sure that better years begin. 

Guard her as your polestar there, 

Sweet and true and half a child, 

Unfulfilled, forever fair, 

Till your pain is reconciled 

With the strength that marks despair. 



THe Idol 103 



Hold her high and climb to her, 
Till your worship wins its own; 
Though no pulse of passion stir, 
Tears and kisses too, unknown; 
Till her eyes your crown confer. 



S. S. Medic, 1' 20 '09. 



FREEDOM 

MEN are born free and equal? These are lies, 
We were born slaves to free ourselves and rise. 
Slaves to the passions of ten thousand years, 
The lusts that died ; the bitter, barren tears. 
We were born warriors. In each human skin 
Battle the germs of sickness, shame and sin, 
Of death and life; of error and of truth, 
And none shall hold his citadel of youth, 
Inviolate at all hours day and night. 
The foe shall enter and the soul shall fight — 
Surprised, outnumbered, beaten to the ground, 
By its best friends betrayed; and blinded, bound, 
Bleeding and dying: or resurgent, strong, 
Indomitable, grim, besieged by wrong, 
Hungered, athirst, unsleeping and alone; 
Relieved at last by forces not its own. 
Freedom is warfare. There your brother stands, 
Smiles till he takes his life with his own hands, 
You were too blind, too shrewd, too weak ; afraid, 
His soul's frontiers to force, invade and aid — 
The arch-foe's stolen city to retake. 
Freedom is wisdom loved for wisdom's sake. 
Efficiency, the science hardly won, 
By struggling ages, work well planned, well done, 

104 



Freedom 105 

Freedom is love that keeps its altar clean, 
City and home and nation ; fire unseen 
Or flaming beacon, for one purpose trained. 
Freedom is service; strongest when constrained. 
Ranged with its ranks alone your souls shall be 
Heirs of the freedom of the hills and sea. 

Paris, 12' 21 '08. 



THE COUNTERSIGN 

THERE is one talent it is death to hide, 
God's self can pardon not, the suicide 
Of flesh and soul that thwarts His Holy Ghost. 
Self-sentenced dies the sentry at his post 
Who sleeps and sinks beside the dark frontier 
Of truth and error. Midnight's mists of fear 
Assail thy spirit. Hardly shalt thou pace 
The weary rounds of loneliness, and face 
The shapes that stalk thee. Pluck thy burning brand 
From truth's camp-fire. The brute that cannot stand 
Slinks back and bides his time. And so must thou. 

But if in man's own shape it fronts thee; now 
Summon thy strength's reserves, thy challenge cry, 
"Stand thou and speak, or one of us shall die." 
Hast thou well loved her, has the crisis come? 
Her soul and thine shall die if both be dumb. 
Is thy friend strong and blind? Then thou must pray, 
Wrestle and win, or trampled into clay 
Give up thy breath in honor. Even so 
Jacob with angels strove; and from the glow 
Of Nero's gardens, martyr torches flamed 
To light our way. God's purpose is not shamed, 
Thwarted nor darkened by our sins to-day. 

106 



THe Countersign 107 

We all, our nation's destinies may sway. 
We who have grace to lead our fellow-men, 
Guard or destroy; the gift of tongue or pen, 
Power or wealth, or science; insight, art; 
Panders or prophets, all must stand apart: 
Out of our hour of darkness call, or fall, 
Are you j or truth or treason to us all? 

Paris, n' 21 '08. 



THE REAL THING 

YES, you 're down, you 're dazed, you 're sore. 
But you '11 get up again. 
Take the count and watch his arm if you 've got head 

enough. 
If the girl 's gone and she never will come back, alive, 
There 're as good as she on earth still. On my word 

there are. 
If it 's money, you '11 make more. The world is full 

of it, 
Full of people simply waiting to give up to you. 
If it 's drink, there 's time to sidestep till the final 

round, 
If you 're sick and sad, the better times are bound to 

come. 
If you 're hungry, there are others that are hungrier, 
If you 've lost a friend forever you '11 get next to him 
Just by making other friends like him and keeping 

them, 
If it 's death itself you 're facing, so 's the world as well. 
If he can't be countered longer, every one of us 
Soon or late must go against the big black heavy- 
weight. 
He 's your sparring partner merely. If he knocks 

you out 

108 



The Real Thing 109 

It 's because your trainer simply thinks you need a 
rest. 

So it 's up to you to show him you 're no quitter yet. 

Other rings in heaven or hell there are you 're 
scheduled for 

Where you 've got to go against the real thing, some- 
time, soon or late. 

Men like you have landed knockouts in defeat's own 
face. 

Get one blow in first. Last one round more, for God's 
sake, man. 

Paris, 12' 21 '08. 



IGDRASIL 

EXISTENCE is a tree," the Norsemen said. 
Silent it grows through all eternity, 
Each branch a nation, every leaf a life. 
Death is the wind that comes and shakes the leaves. 
We know not whence it comes nor where it goes, 
Nor what it is, nor why at times it breathes 
So soft the withered leaves alone must fall; 
Nor why, again, its blasts shake all the tree, 
And boughs are reft away, and leaves still green 
Are whirled through farthest space. Nor can we tell 
How buds this life of ours, and how it fades, 
What is the nourishment its roots receive, 
And what the blasting sources of decay. 
We only know we are, and then are not; 
While, soft or fierce, forever blows the wind; 
And silent grows the tree, eternally. 

Hartford, 10' 3 '93. 



no 



LOVE LETTERS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST XI 

LOVE, let me hold you close while light is ours. 
Not in the night's mad rapture are we near. 
Siegfried the strong in song has made it clear 
A sword most sharp divides the marriage bed. 
We may not forge in passion's furnace red 
Bonds that shall hold while cold the spirit cowers. 

Within the mirrors twin your eyes uplift 
I see my own true image near and plain. 
At noon's high tide a moment we remain, 
Then shadows lengthen into weary years. 
Flesh knit to flesh with kisses and with tears 
Death shall divide, and time make wide the rift. 

How shall we hold together, heart of gold? 
Death is a sword of steel most bitter keen. V \ 
How shall we fare through farthest stars unseen 
Beyond the black abysm of space to meet? 
Love, shall the lips whose touch is piercing sweet 
Whisper one word when life in us lies cold? 

Shall instinct blind that brings the birds again 
Back from the winter to last summer's nest 
Be strong to bid our love survive the test? 
Have we not lost the scent of forest things? 
Hath hope unbent the spirit's slackened wings? 
Shall faith in longing spent forget forever pain? 



ii2 Love Letters of an IDvoKitionist XI 

How shall we know that all is not a He? 
More dear than life itself I hold you, dear. 
Here in this word is heard a word of cheer, 
Since at your feet my life I 'd gladly lay 
God must be good to give and take away, 
And pay again the price beyond the sky. 

New York, 8' 14 '04. 



THE PORTRAIT 

TO paint a portrait of her that would live 
Longer than Raphael's fairest Mother of God, 
This is the task that I have set myself. 
And I shall fail. For I should have to blend 
All of the flowers that make this old world fair, 
All of the dawns and sunsets of the ages, 
To fix the changing color of her face. 
And I should want the wind that sways the grain 
To show the way she comes to welcome me ; 
And all the lights and shadows of the ocean 
In storm and sunshine > to suggest her eyes. 
As for the soul that wakes and slumbers there, 
That wavers round her lips like living music, 
Near and elusive, I should have to borrow 
The dreams of poets, and the hearts of heroes, 
That leap to war with wrong instinctively ; 
All of the joys and sorrows of the city 
Wherein she lives and learns and lifts a torch 
To honor and her pilgrims. I should need 
The tenderness of lovers and of mothers, 
The insight half divine that heals the sick, 
Redeems the fallen, makes the feeble strong, 
And every one more glad, that looks on her, 
Night's mystery and noon's unsullied light, 
To make her real to eyes that may not see. 
8 "3 



ii4 THe Portrait 

She is more true and vital than myself, 
And though no canvas ever can contain her 
In every man's hard heart she lives immortal, 
Ideal, like Galatea masked in stone; 
Till time the sculptor sets her free forever. 

New York, io' 14 '09. 



DREAM CHILDREN 

BY winter firesides have they most been missing, 
O maiden mother with the withered breast? 
Neath summer starlight have you felt their kissing 
Soft in the shadow by the breeze caressed? 
Then have they grown to crown each gracious shoulder, 
Wings of the spirit that a seraph seems, 
Arms of the mother love that grows not older, 
Strength of the weak that bears the babes of dreams? 

Have you been wise, to see the sordid city 

Cruel and vast and sick with suffering ; 

Out of the ardent passion of your pity 

Learning the light to languid eyes to bring? 

Have you been strong to cast your arms around them, 

Harlot and thief and widow sore bereft ; 

Making each child your own where'er you found them, 

Stilling the throb of pain while life was left? 

Sister of sin and shame and all who sorrow, 
Prophet and priest and fighting man forspent; 
We who must toil to-day to build to-morrow 
Out of the ruins of our discontent; 
We who must strive to stir the love whose leaven 
Quickens alone the life naught else redeems ; 
This is our surest proof and pledge of heaven, 
Children whose smiles we only see in dreams. 

Paris, 4' 22 '08. 



115 



VII— THE WEST 
THE GUN 

1AM the Anglo-Saxon's second tongue. 
I was the ultimate word of your nation young, 
When Standish marched and his cannon stood 
On the meeting-house roof to rake the wood, 
And the Ironside grandsires slew, their prayers among. 

I was the frontier's call and countersign, 
When the pioneers deployed their fighting line, 
And the forest fell before their stern assault ; 
And the Union rose and marched nor stayed to halt, 
And life was brave and free, and death divine. 

I was the soul that woke at Lexington, 
That spoke at Yorktown till the work was done, 
That echoed back the roar of Waterloo, 
That Wellington's most seasoned soldiers slew 
And saw the Mississippi crimson run. 

I was the voice that swelled at Sumter's fall 
Northward and Eastward, Westward, rousing all; 
Until a million men in battle stood ; 
And Freedom's charter by their blood made good, 
Struck off the shackles from the alien thrall. 

116 



TKe Gun 117 

I was the herald of the Golden West. 

I woke the voiceless echoes, fired the quest. 

I spoke for Sitting Bull, Geronimo. 

From lava beds to peaks of crimsoned snow 

I wrote the Red Man's last red righting test. 

I am the court supreme of last appeal, 

When bombshells burst o'er frontiers carved with 

steel, 
Whether from Prussia, Africa, Japan; 
If ye shall breed no more your fighting man, 
Chastened and suppliant, sentenced ye shall kneel. 

Honolulu, 4' 27 '09. 



THE FLOODS 

AGES on countless ages the forest slowly grew, 
And we came in clouds from the ocean, and 
the raindrops filtered through 
The living screen of the branches as they sifted light 

and shade. 
And the winds of heaven whispered through the twi- 
light we had made. 

And the deer through the glades went gliding below; 

and high above 
The birds in their nesting echoed the Indian's songs 

of love, 
And we ran in a limpid river and we spread in the 

placid lake, 
Where canoes that steal like shadows scarcely a ripple 

make. 

And you came and you brought your discords to the 
forest's symphony. 

And we heard the sound of the axes and the crash of 
the falling tree, 

And the strident gride of the saw-mill, and the rail- 
road's whistle shrill, 

And the roar of the burning forest where once the 
world was still. 

118 



The Floods 119 

Since you have spoiled our handiwork and idle strength 

set free, 
And the waters rise in the springtime as the sap swells 

in the tree; 
You shall fly from our futile fury and our havoc wide 

repair. 
We are the strength of the nation's youth your haste 

has wasted there. 

In the noonday's heat and burden the earth is rent 

and scarred, 
Gutted and gashed with gullies like the lives your 

hands have marred. 
And the sandy barrens widen. In a world devoid of 

shade 
Fire and famine follow us through the desert you have 

made. 

You have taken peace from the people; beauty and 

joy and ease. 
You have built them huts of timber where once were 

growing trees. 
Though we turn ten thousand spindles where the 

river dwindles lean, 
Can we weave a cloak for your nakedness like the 

forest's robe of green? 

Vainly you darken your city's streets, and steel on 

stone- work pile, 
While you bare the flanks of the mountains and our 

sources pure defile. 
You have wounded the world and wasted it. And 

your sons shall bear the scars, 



120 THe Floods 

And shall starve where the arclights glitter and their 
dazzle hides the stars. 

You must sow the seeds of the spirit. You must 

plant the trees again 
For the sake of your children's children and the 

pleasant sound of rain. 

Paris, ii' 12 '08. 



GRAIN 

LIGHT was reft from darkness, land and sea 
appeared. 
One unchanging purpose wide the field surveyed. 
Strange chaotic forms of life lusted, slew and feared, 
Hungered, died and fertilized the soil that love had 
made. 

Glaciers plowed the prairies, rivers rose and ran. 
Earth was robed in verdure. Slowly grew the grain 
Toward to-day's perfection. And so the mind of 

man 
Learned to plow and sow and reap and garner home 

again. 

Here the soil primeval lay till yesterday, 

Virgin, fair, and spared a new-born nation's need to 

feed, 
Here the happy hunting grounds where men might 

love and slay 
Nursed the childhood of the race nor knew the taint 

of greed. 

Flowers filled the plains with light. Dusky bison 
hordes 

121 



122 Grain 

On their last migration passed. Red men, pioneers 
Into silence followed them. And so this earth affords 
Food for famished millions and a storehouse for the 
years : 

Counters for your corners, money for your lust, 
Rations for the regiments of tyranny and pain. 
Fertile, fair and undefiled for righteous and unjust 
Grows the nation's sacrament of sunshine turned to 
grain. 

Reapers shear the Golden Fleece. Threshers winnow 

fine. 
Mills shall grind it into dust, and men the seed shall 

sow. 
Death and resurrection and service, all divine, 
From its daily bread of toil the world shall grow to 

know. 

Leagues of flame aspiring, waves of living light, 
Sway across the plains. The winds like seraphs stoop 

again, 
Hold their breath adoring before the wondrous sight, 
Heaven's golden floor on earth, a glory wrought of 

grain. 

Paris, n' 19 '09. 



THE CANYON 

GOD opened here His folded book 
That men might read. He scored each wall 
Where snows of myriad winters fall 
And wasting, waste the stubborn rock 
Whose beetling fringes overlook 
The sullen torrent's surge and shock. 

Each noon He bids His sun bow down 

To utter deeps where far below 

The fallen waters restless flow. 

Each night His stars are mirrored there. 

And where His crags unbending frown 

He sets His flowers to make them fair. 

Royal Gorge, i' 16 '04. 



123 



THE SNOW PEAKS 

THE hills are bowed about their feet, 
The plains lie prone and far below. 
They lift their hands their Lord to greet 
In sacerdotal robes of snow. 

Shades unassoiled their matins throng 
When sunrise lights its candles high, 
And cloudy incense trails along 
The eastern altar of the sky. 

The roll of thunder's organ tone 
Their silences of noon has stirred. 
To their enduring hearts of stone 
The storm winds preach a holy word. 

Strict vigil through the dark they keep. 
Through night's tall temple windows they 
While all the world is wrapped in sleep 
The stars of heaven behold and pray. 

New York, f 2 '99. 



124 



THE ROOSEVELT DAM 

WE set our symbol at our valley's gates 
Where the floods rushed together. Strong it 
stands 
To bar their way. The alien from all lands 
Shall come to marvel where this bulwark waits: 

Shall see the silent majesty of law, 
The bridge that binds the high heroic past 
To that more lofty future, that at last 
Shall test our building, every fault and flaw. 

Already in its shadow slowly rise 

Waters once wasted that at last shall flow 

To bring the mountains near and melting snow 

To desert ranches drear and rainless skies. 

And you whose purpose would the clouds compel, 
For whom all rivers run, all oceans bear 
More to your mountain ; master-millionaire 
Shall you not learn to serve and so do well? 

Paris, ii' 12 'o8. 



125 



THE STAMPS 

THE crash of our anvil chorus reechoes day by 
day, 
A d the rocks go down before us and the mountains 

melt away. 
We are keeping time, we are marking step till the 

army onward tramps. 
And the sway and the surge of labor's hosts is the war- 
song of the stamps. 

They have prisoned powers of thunder to swing our 

hammer heads; 
And the earth for an anvil under have set, and the 

watersheds 
Where the rocks are piled, and the foot-hills heaped, 

and the ranges upward roll 
In stark Titanic stonework of the watch towers of the 

soul. 

And our iron roll unending rings long across the 

night. 
With a roar and a sound of rending we drum you to 

the fight, 
And the new recruits in double shifts come hurrying 

to our call 
To the fort of life beleaguered by the shades that wait 

for all. 

126 



THe Stamps 127 

And we fall and flail the strong and true from the dross 

that drifts away. 
This is the task we share with you to shake the soul 

from clay. 
And our ammunition trains roll out. And the cities' 

scattered camps 
Are reinforced, and each weak redoubt, by the powder 

from the stamps. 

Paris, 11' 16 '08. 



THE DESERT 

HERE long ago beneath a leaden sky 
Titans and devils strove in leaguer vast. 
On mesas lone their scarped entrenchments lie 
In broken ranks that witness to the past. 
And the low foot-hills rise in shallow waves 
To make a multitude of giants' graves. 

Here heaven's siege guns thunder sullen still. 
The baffled lightnings stab the barren sand. 
Here lurks the rattlesnake and strikes to kill, 
The cactus sentinels an arid land. 
Like tears that women shed in pain in vain, 
There falls the broken promise of the rain. 

And here twin threads of steel have traced the trail 

That man must follow on to victory. 

Here must he toil however nature fail ; 

The mountains' secret water springs set free, 

Till children smile where'er a garden grows 

To see the desert blossom like the rose. 

New York, 10' 30 '03. 



128 



THE FLUME 

THEY killed five hundred years of life, - 
Butchered the red wood into planks. 
And higher still they raised their knife 
And scarred the mountain's hoary flanks, 
Smothered a waterfall in gloom, 
And stilled its music in the flume. 

And still the water limpid flows 
Unresting, rapid all the way; 
And brings the chill of melted snows 
To cool the plains that parch to-day; 
And from the hillside's citadel 
Sends succor to a city's hell. 

And light flames forth where light was not. 
And power transmitted, life transfused 
In surgeon's cauteries is hot. 
And nature's vital force is used 
To sear and scar and sterilize 
The sickness that unsuccored dies. 

The water murmurs through the flume 
Since we have stabbed the mountain's veins 
And made our mother's strength assume 
The burden of our sins and pains. 
But the great Surgeon surely knows 
Why love that falls unfailing flows. 

Paris, ii' 19 '08. 



129 



THE REDMAN 

OUT of the dark and bloody soil 
That colored red his human clay, 
Out of Kentucky's wild turmoil 
He learned to trail and slay. 

We felled the forest o'er his head, 
We spoiled his hunting, stole his home, 
O'er prairies bare, untenanted 
We drove him forth to roam. 

He is our brother Ishmael. 
As Israel dealt with Hagar's son, 
Outcast, at war with all to dwell, 
So have our soldiers done. 

Out of the mountain's last retreat 
Where rattlesnakes on lava lurk, 
Out of the desert's hoarded heat 
Where gold calls man to work; 

We forced him fighting to the last. 
We ringed him round from sea to sea, 
A smear of red upon our past, 
To-day, and time to be. 
130 



THe Redman 131 

For the same harsh environment 
That made him subtle, restless, grim, 
Unsparing to the innocent, 
Has fashioned us like him. 

So we have lost our last frontier, 
Our epic red from coast to coast. 
And merciless, who know no fear, 
The victors suffer most. 

Paris, 12' 28 '08. 



VIII— POLEMICS 
THE EXPATRIATES 

YOU call us all expatriates because we stay away, 
And are n't convinced that work per se's more 

sane always than play. 
You get the habit, use your minds for muscles, motors, 

scales, 
To weigh the money value of to-day that stands or 

fails. 
Earth shuts you up in motor cells of its big brain of 

steel. 
Here we 've perspective, atmosphere. We find the 

time to feel, 
To criticise, interpret art's historic loveliness, 
We all are heirs to. Are you sure we love our country 

less? 
Not more? We 're frank to-day; we are deserters 

from the cause 
Of truth and freedom there at home; enforcement of 

just laws, 
Impartial, wise, efficient; like you whose breathless 

haste 
Has glutted you with power you waste like wealth 

your women waste. 
Barbarians all, like dynamos, like soulless summer 

flies. 

132 



TKe Expatriates 133 

They come abroad and shame us in the whole of 

Europe's eyes. 
Your work at home defrauds our sons, together with 

your own, 
And men shall rise against you. And when that hour 

is known 
And earth's last revolution breaks the trusts your 

lusts abuse 
We will come home and fight you or with you as you 

choose. 
We hate your noise, your blatant boasts, your swagger, 

glitter, greed. 
Your yellow journal's creed we read: "At any cost 

succeed." 
We love our country most because we see her faults 

and yours, 
And underneath the purpose strong that freedom still 

insures ; 
That crowds earth's bargain counters and the sales 

you advertise, 
Drummers of loud prosperity and watered stock and 

lies. 
America 's not there nor here, it 's everywhere to-day, 
It wakes the world, its last frontier finds savagery at 

bay, 
In darkest Russia, Africa, Manhattan darker yet, 
Where fouler tyranny than Rome's you tax or else 

forget. 
America 's a state of mind, a mission of the soul. 
Show us the way to win it. We '11 race you to our 

goal. 

Paris, 12' 3 '08. 



MONEY 

WHAT will you do with it? What will it do, 
What has it done, is it doing with you? 
Nations have fought and died; sages have thought, 
Heaped up your heritage. Ages have wrought 
Strength for your children, their duty and dower, 
Wealth, obligation and peril and power. 
Waste it, you waste yourselves; hoard it, you shrink 
Will muscles dwindle, and minds fail to think. 
Let it alone. It mounts up like a flood, 
Filth from your tenements; God's flesh and blood 
Racked in your railroad wrecks, maimed in your 

mills. 
You are inertia that crushes and kills, 
Moves through its weight; is blind. More you are 

mind. 
Either to stifle man's spirit resigned 
Or its sworn champion. Dwindle or grow. 
This is your talent who no others know. 
Give it away and your hands are not clean, 
More than were Pilate's. You serve the machine, 
You who should rule it. You shall not be safe. 
Duty means danger. Your spirit shall chafe, 
Grapple the levers (as eyes grasp the goal), 
Ride on past wrecks to the heights of the soul. 

134 



Money 135 

Perilous, strait, is the path past the pit. 

This is environment. Are you unfit? 

Freedom means service. You hold in your hands 

Blood of the martyrs, your nation that stands, 

Rises or falls; all the essence of time, 

Millions of lives that shall wallow or climb. 

Fail, the world fails with you. Cheat at its game, 

Those you love best bear their share of the shame. 

Paris, 2' 8 '08. 






THE BALLOT 

WHAT do you make of it? What will you do 
with it? 
How do you think that you well will get through with 

it? 
Here is the problem life puts in your hands. 
What do you know of each name as it stands? 
Common report or a newspaper's praises, 
Paid for and false, or a lie that amazes, 
Damning your friend, or else nothing at all? 
Here is our formula. All great and small 
Freely shall vote without favor or fear 
Govern themselves. Do you find it so here? 
Here are the candidates, A, B, and C, 
Quantities known, and unknown, Y and Z. 
What do you know of them? What will you do with 

them? 
Spending each year, scarce one minute or two with 

them? 
Many spend less. Are they fools more than you? 
Truth shall examine you claiming its due. 
Ignorant, blundering, reckless, for sale 
Here you walk up to your life's task and fail. 
What do you think of them, daughters and wives? 
Are these men fit for the race that survives? 

136 



The Ballot 137 

Who in one million of you does her share 

Having money and brains and full leisure to spare? 

All of us slaves to a single machine 

Mammon's and Moloch's, to aims crude and mean, 

Breathless and blindly we blunder each day. 

Schoolboys for folly are scourged. So we pay. 

We are in haste and our sons shall pay more. 

Shall they, or shall we yet even the score? 

Or must we wait till these boys in our schools 

Find us out cowards and spendthrifts and fools? 

Paris, 12' 7 '08. 



THE SANCTUM 



IS this cell a sanctum? Surely if the devils keep 
Inner shrines in Hell obscurely. Here we never 
sleep. 
For a single soul's damnation all the world we scan, 
Throwing mud at all creation, mocking God and man. 



Here we 1 hastened for our schooling when our youth 

was white, 
Here our evil angels ruling tripped us into night, 
Here the chains of custom hold us, women that we 

wed. 
Children's little arms enfold us, lest they lack for 

bread. 

Therefore we retail our treason, tell the people lies, 
Print each foul and perjured reason, point each vile 

surmise ; 
Do the bidding of our masters who their profit take 
From humanity's disasters and its felons make. 

Here these narrow walls bear witness to a nation's 

shame, 
To a century's unfitness. Here the robbers came, 

138 



THe Sanctum 



139 



Here they plotted, here they bartered, here they 

bribed and bought; 
Sick and starving millions martyred, strangled love 

and thought. 

Woman's secret shame revealing, we do murder here. 
Manhood's honor tricking, stealing; fraud and hate 

and fear, 
Servants blind of evolution, wired to this chair 
For a soul's electrocution ; find their mouthpiece there. 

Here for virtue's vivisection stands this desk, a rack, 
Until lust and greed's infection, isolated, black; 
Yields to truth that strikes unswerving though our 

lesser lives 
Pass, their tortured purpose serving. So the race 

survives. 

New York, 10' 18 '09. 



THE ARMOR BEARERS 

LORD of the levelled lightnings, of battle's thunder 
cloud ; 
Thou that dost shake the hearts of men and make 

and break the proud, 
Granting each race and nation grace, each in its space 
allowed: 

War in the East is rising. War in the West is rife, 
And the nations gird their armor on to grapple for the 

life, 
Nor shall we stand aloof for long in a world o'er- 

whelmed with strife. 

Yellow or brown, or black or white, one race shall 

lead the van. 
And the old gods wake. And the false gods quake. 

Buddha, Mohammed, Pan, 
Come side by side to conquer Christ in the last 

crusades of man. 

And the restless city sends us forth to sentinel the 

seas; 
And the iron lusts that spur the North, through peril 

and unease, 
Shepherds of fleets and ocean lanes and lives and 

liberties. 

140 






THe Armor Bearers 141 

Harlot and thief and money king ; their burdens all we 

bear. 
Pander and felon, faithless wife, the price we pay they 

share, 
They that dare take their profit from a starving child's 

despair. 

Therefore we war with sea and storm that we may 

war with men, 
Because the blind must lead the blind, the brute be 

mastered when 
Thy vials of wrath are emptied out and judgment 

comes again. 

We are thine armor bearers, Lord of all power and 

i might, 

Guarding thine arms till thou shalt leave thy last 

frontier of light 
And turn to earth to summon us to Armageddon's 

fight. 

Then if our quarrel be unjust when we put out to sea, 
Scapegoats the mob before them thrust their shield 

defaced to be, 
Our navies are as drifting dust, and crimsoned clay 

are we. 

San Francisco, 5* 11 '09. 



SWEAT SHOP CHILDREN 

THESE are the little ones of three or four 
Whose infant fingers never learned to play 
Who sit and pluck the basting threads all day ; 
Frail strands of life that ravel grimed and gray, 
That fret and fray and fall along the floor, 
In filth and shadow lost are seen no more. 

These are the eyes that never learn to smile, 

That see such sunlight as the diver sees, 

Strained through the nether seas where never breeze 

Shall stir the stagnant depths. Of such are these 

Who eye their one dim window blindly while 

As blind their mothers stare, imbruted, vile. 

These are the ears that hear no sound of mirth 
Through the black winter's bleak and bitter cold; 
Through the gray days when fog wreathes, fold on fold 
Strangle the acrid air; when women hold 
The babes unblessed that die before their birth, 
In August's Tophet; these defile the earth. 

These are the tongues that never learn to tell 
Whisper of love or word of faith or cheer, 
Stories of stars and saints and all things dear, 
How shall they sing whose only faith is fear? 
How shall they love who all in darkness dwell? 
How shall they hope whose only home is hell? 

142 



Sweat SKop Children 143 

These are the seeds that bear their bitter fruit 
Of pestilence that slays both flesh and soul ; 
God's bowstring mutes that bear His fatal scroll. 
Mutely they answer death's unending roll, 
Pander and felon, thief and prostitute. 
Sharing their sentence we shall stand as mute. 

Paris, 12' 1 '08. 



THE CHILD 

YOU who are breathless through your busy day, 
Stay. Have you ever wandered from the way 
To where the houses stoop and sag and crowd, 
Debased and vile? There women cry aloud 
And no man listens. Have you climbed within 
Up the steep stairs of pain and shame and sin, 
And sought to find inside some shadowed room 
A sick child sleeping in the stagnant gloom, 
Vhose pallid face and sunken dismal eyes 
Still might grow fair and mirror God's own skies? 

Say have you paused to watch your fellow's face 
Near, in the street here, manhood's black disgrace; 
Lips like a sword gash, hard, unsmiling, strong 
In all the iron lusts of greed and wrong; 
Lost to delight and numb to tenderness. 
Dumbly their shame, their failure they confess, 
Like the cold eyes. The drawn and frowning brows 
Under their pent two lurking captives house. 
Restless, insatiate, the millionaire 
Paces his cell, serves his life sentence there. 

Could you but bring the child that slumbers there 
Out of the spirit's slums to larger air 
Into God's sunshine, let His winds of grace 
Lighten the lines and shadows of the face, 

144 



The Child 145 

Waken the soul that sinks, and yet recalls 
Visions of sunlit seas and garden walls, 
Echoes of careless song and love and mirth ; 
You would build heaven's kingdom here on earth. 
"You must be born again," the Scripture saith, 
Many, so many, only after death. 

New York, 9'_i8 '07. 



THE VICTORS 

WE have fought and we have made the pace and 
risen from the ruck. 
We have got our grip on piracy and learned to 

discount luck. 
And the little men kow-tow to us. The big ones stand 

aside. 
In hundred horse-power racing cars straight to our 

mark we ride. 
And we break the last speed limit. And we hog the 

whole highway 
For the earth to-day belongs to those who have the 

power to pay. 

We have dammed the whole world's money lust, its 

hunger and its cold. 
With our irrigation rentals legislatures bought and 

sold, 
Fix our tariffs and our subsidies. Immunity we buy. 
And justice is our serving wench. Her lovers steal 

and lie. 
They are wedded to our wages. They are panders to 

our will. 
We make machines that mangle men and maim and 

crush and kill. 

146 



THe Victors 147 

And women starve and walk the streets, and gutter 

children curse 
In the sweatshops, on the sidewalks, that defile the 

universe. 
And we have to bear the brunt of it. The muck-rake 

handlers tell 
How the masters of the millions try to raise the rents 

of hell. 
And the press that can't be subsidized its searchlight 

arrows sends 
Till they nail us to the target of a life that 's lost its 

friends. 

It 's a life that loses interest when you weary of the 

game, 
And you see that all creation will be running just the 

same 
When you have to leave the levers, and there's no one 

left to care; 
And the flowers are still in blossom on the ramparts 

of the air, 
Where the stars stake out their heavens to the souls 

that stayed in touch ; 
And the whole that you 've accomplished does n't 

seem to come to much. 

Yet the world is made for money, and for record stakes 

we played. 
If the game has gone against us we will quit it 

unafraid, 
For there can't be worse before us than the sense of 

all that 's dead 



148 The Victors 

With our broken dreams of boyhood, in the blackness 

there ahead. 
And our work shall stand to witness in a world of 

fighting men 
Till the Master of to-morrow whispers, "Son, begin 

again." 

New York, 10' n '09. 



FLOTSAM 

PARKS may be the city's breathing places, 
If they are, they breed tuberculosis, 
Little ones like this where most you find us. 
Hoboes, beggars, race-course touts, repeaters, 
Poolroom sharps, bums, failures, thieves and panders. 
There 's the city lodging-house, its vermin 
Bred and fed by us for generations. 
There are free lunch counters and the bread line. 
There are easy marks with dimes and nickels. 
Beer is cheap, the papers are still cheaper — 
And cigar butts can be had for nothing. 
There are women fools enough to trust us, 
Prostitutes and our own wives and daughters, 
When you 're up against it hard, the wood-yard. 
When the weather 's cold you break a window, 
One on Broadway rilled with phoney diamonds, 
Go to jail and let the city keep you, 
Laugh at starving fools that think they 're honest. 
Nothing matters much unless you 're thirsty 
Or a copper beats you up for nothing, 
Just one finger of the hand that scratches 
When we bite too hard. You 're just as lousy 
As we are ourselves. Your lungs are putrid 
With us and our like and we infect you. 

149 



150 Flotsam 

So we go along with you to judgment. 
Hell, you 've got to die as well as we have. 
Then, what good will all your money do you? 
If we had one chance you had a thousand. 
God himself can't say that we have made you, 
And the devil knows you '11 stand for us then. 

New York, io* 14 '09. 



YOU 

YOU of the higher selfishness whose god is self 
sublimed, 
Whose cult is culture carved or sung, or written, 

painted, rhymed, 
Who hug your little hoard along the ledge where you 
have climbed; 

And dream you near the mountain- top, and dread to 

look below 
From misty seats Olympian and life's grim battle 

know, 
And men like you that starve and slay, whose blood 

and tears must flow. 

You feed to surfeiting with lies, you raise the false 

ideal 
Of sterile ease immaculate, that others dimly feel 
Since you are far, aloof, unknown ; is fair and high and 

real. 

You blindly die. Unfit to strive, the beauty of the 

strong, 
The soul that keeps its light alive through warfare 

long with wrong 
That soiled and scarred shall still survive, a living 

marching song, 

151 



152 You 

Is not for you; ye faithless Scribes and Pharisees to- 
day 

Who anise, mint and cummin weigh, and tithes of 
trifles pay; 

Who wrest the spirit of tne law and love's great soul 
betray ; 

Whose single talent vellum wrapped, in gloss and 

comment hid, 
Must moulder more than multiply until the world is 

rid 
Of moral loss and leprosy ; till men your like forbid. 

You are the palace eunuchs of the world's seraglio 

dark. 
You are the spirit's panders. Your gifts like jewels 

mark 
A soul's seduction from the light of truth. And still 

we hark 

To prophets false, to priests that preach the symbol 

for the deed. 
Whose empty chalice gem-adorned you hold to hands 

that bleed. 
For you have spilled the wine of life and crucified its 

creed. 

And still the people suffer you, pain brings forgetful- 

ness, 
And strife and grief each day grow great; and loyal 

love grows less; 
Deserters from the cause of God whose name your 

lips confess; 



You 153 

Clergy, professors, critics, all who share the cynic's 
view, 

Children who dream till scales shall fall and judg- 
ment day be due. 

Ye know not what ye do. For all is pardon, so for 
you. 

Paris, ii' 27 '08. 



IX— VARIA 
THE PHONOGRAPH 

I AM the voice of your race and hour, strident, 
mechanical, harsh. 
And my megaphone with its brazen flower like a lily 

in the marsh 
In the stagnant souls and minds of men quickens a 

vague perfume 
Till the past grows near and clear again through the 

grayness and the gloom. 
And the seeds of thought and of feeling hid in the 

blackness of the clay 
My silent record's dust amid, I harrow forth to-day. 
And they bloom in the faces wan and worn and they 

brighten weary eyes, 
And faith and hope and love reborn make a moment's 

Paradise. 
Where the blubber melts and the ceiling drips in the 

Eskimo's hut of snow, 
In the foc'sles dim of deep-sea ships; where the trades 

through palm trees blow, 
Under the blaze of the tropic stars, on the islands of 

the mist, 
Where the mining camp the mountain scars, my 

monotones persist. 

i54 



TKe Phonograph 155 

In the forest dark, in the darker den whence the sav- 
age raids the slum, 
I charm the hearts of brutes and men, I waken voices 

dumb. 
More than the printed book I say; more than the 

written word, 
Or the preacher's art, I seize and sway. Wherever 

my voice is heard 
And the people gather by twos and threes, red men 

and black and white, 
I open larger liberties of vision and delight. 
I am the voice of your race and hour, the sound of 

your vast machine, 
And a gospel new of truth and power, a word from 

the world unseen. 
Strident, mechanical, harsh am I, to your breathless 

measures set, 
But I tell of a land beyond the sky, of a life ye shall 

not forget. 

S. S. Medic, 2' 16 '09. 



THE SONG OF THE WIRES 

BIRTH of the world and the wrestle of elements, 
sudden division of darkness from light, 

Such were the powers whose strength had begotten us, 
e'er we were prisoned in aeons of night. 

Then came the miners, they found and they fashioned 
us, stretched us afar over earth and below. 

Some in the sunshine are harpstrings, Aeolian, reso- 
nant, struck by the winds when they blow; 

Some in the shadow taught tenderer harmonies, 
laughter of lovers bring lip unto lip ; 

Mother's devotion and children's endearments and 
tidings of cheer from the tempest-tossed ship, 

Whirl round the world. And we whisper the infamies 
men and our masters constrain us to tell, 

Their slanders and rumors and treasons and per- 
juries. Secrets eternal of science we spell. 

Lifework of prophets and priests and philosophers, 
vision of poets and raptures of saints, 

Notes that arise from the stress of our symphony, 
cries of the flesh and the spirit that faints. 

And the roar of the market-place swells and shall 

storm, overwhelming the day, 
And your homes and your hearts shall invade and 

possess, and the night shall not drive it away. 
156 



The Song of tHe Wires 157 

And its echoes shall trouble your slumbers while you 

start at our summoning bells; 
To the hills and the seas shall pursue you with a spell 

that allures and compels. 
And the forests shall yield you no refuge. You shall 

raze them and set them ablaze. 
You shall prospect for gold in the desert with the thirst 

that first maddens, then slays. 
You shall toil and shall widen the city till its ulcer 

of steel and of stone 
Eats the flesh from God's earth and its beauty. You 

flay the world bare to the bone. 
You shall strive and your hearts shall be hardened and 

shortened your sight and your breath, 
You shall stifle your souls and shall rest not till you 

lie in the silence of death. 

This is the truth that we tell in a tongue inarticulate, 

mute, 
This is our warning and prayer in the path of your 

breathless pursuit. 
Voices that wrangled in chaos, through silence of 

centuries taught 
Service and order and law and the ultimate triumph 

of thought, 
Freed by your hands to enlighten your spirits, and 

rendered again 
Slaves to your weakness to-day that to-morrow in 

strength shall remain, 
Powers that throb in your pulses and order the drift 

of the sun, 
Weighing and strictly recording the good and the ill 

ye have done, 



158 THe Song of tKe Wires 

Messengers dumb and divine, and your kinsmen, we 

counsel you still; 
Watching your steps for a sign of the way of the 

infinite Will. 

Paris, ii* 7 '08. 



THE SONG OF THE TYPEWRITER 

I'M the god from the machine of modern trade, 
And my oracle 's a rattle and a jerk. 
Flying fingers quiver quick 
While I race the ticker's click. 
So I hold a world of weariness to work. 

I 'm a bundle keen of slender twitching nerves, 

And the keyboard where the market prices play. 

And the note that I give forth, 

Restless children of the North, 

You can hear it in your voices more each day. 

When the long dull winter afternoon drags slow, 

And each file you lift seems weighted down with lead, 

And the dollar signs grow dim 

And the rows of figures swim, 

You can hear my hammers pounding in your head. 

They will play you up success that cannot last, 
They will tell you tales of failure's crushing blow, 
But however fares the quest 
They will give you little rest 
Till the end when there is nothing much to show. 

159 



160 The Song of tKe "Type-writer 

Better rest a bit and turn your weary eyes 

To the girl who lays her fingers on my keys, 

Just to catch her weary smile; 

And to dream a little while 

In the long forgotten kingdom of heart's ease. 

I 'm the god from the machine that holds you fast. 

And my sibyl slurs her copy when she can. 

Though her beauty is n't much 

It shall add the saving touch 

To an iron world made merchandise by man. 

New York, 6' 4 '03. 



THE TUNNEL 

THEY have taken the strongest and slightest of 
things, they have prisoned the powers of the air. 
They have narrowed the sweep of the whirlwind's 

wings to a half -inch width; and there 
Each ghostly hafted hammer rings with the rhythm 
of an iron prayer. 

And labor's endless litanies in this crypt that is carved 

in night, 
Sound while the woods and the waters freeze and the 

ground grows hard and white ; 
While the spring awakes and the summer breeze, and 

the world is bathed in light. 

And the rock that grew hard at the lava's height in a 

crater cold gives way. 
And the drills march on, and the dynamite its siege 

guns brings to play. 
And the powers of darkness turn to flight; and the 

workers win toward day. 

Somewhere beyond on the other side of the mountain 

men are toiling, 
Mining the winter's citadel and its storms and rigors 

foiling ; 
Marking humanity's advance by a cable's ceaseless 

coiling. 

ii 161 



162 The Tunnel 

Slowly they move to the tunnel's end and the last 

pale arclights glimmer, 
Where the burnt out carbons strew the way, with 

faces gray and grimmer 
As the screen of stone between grows thin, and the 

flames of life burn dimmer : 

Till the echoing hammers answer fast; and their toil 

in the tunnel ended, 
And the last black barrier rent and passed, and the 

wall by death defended; 
Their own shall lead them out at last into sunlight 

new and splendid. 

Paris, ii* 12 'o8. 



THE COTTON MILL 

THE children in the tropics ran 
Naked and warm and free and fair. 
We preached till trade in prints began. 
We brought our gin and Bibles there 
And found new ways to fetter man. 

We dammed the rivers, rapids taught 
To ply the spindle, wheel and loom, 
And children from the steerage caught 
And prisoned them in noise and gloom 
And long and blindly greed has wrought: 

A spider in a cranny gray 
That sits and spins his strands of steel, 
That sucks the children's lives away, 
Their thirst and hunger cannot feel 
Or hear the words they cannot say. 

Outside the world is warm and bright, 
Within they languish pale and thin, 
And dust and lint and plague and blight 
Their shrunken chests are breathing in. 
They buried four last night. 

And yet they smile in childish glee 
As dancing motes, when through the clouds 
The sunshine breaks, and strive to see; 
And patient sit and spin their shrouds, 

And wonder wistfully. 
163 



1 64 The Cotton Mill 

They cough and choke and strangle there, 
And greed the spider old and gray 
From each frail life exacts his share. 
We women who his prices pay 
His leper's livery wear. 

Paris, 10 '3 '06. 



THE SUPREME COURT 

THIS is our National Academy 
Of human rights, the sanctuary of freedom. 
Here there is silence. While the Senate chaffers 
And the House raves, and all the world outside 
Batters its breaches in the walls of peace, 
These old men sit deliberate and wise, 
And weigh their evidence. So shall you see 
A laboratory's balance room, the scales 
Where twenty letters on a sheet of paper 
Shall outweigh ten. They place their test tubes there, 
Write down the ultimate analysis 
Of equity, until the formula 
Of justice stands assured, irrevocable. 
This is the higher criticism of truth, 
In flesh and blood beyond all written records. 
And here the hand of God as truly writes 
As when the lightnings shook the mountain top 
And Moses bore the tables of the law 
From trembling Sinai. Not in storm or earthquake, 
The shoutings of the street, the roar of war 
And revolutions, does He speak to-day, 
But in the still small voice that here ordains 
Cities of refuge for the souls of men 
Whereof this is the chief. So long as we 

165 



166 TKe Supreme Court 

Shall guard this inner shrine inviolate, 
Passion and avarice, unrest and treason, 
Shall be no more than fevers in the body- 
While the brain rules, and will indomitable 
Holds fast our Anglo-Saxon heritage 
Of freedom and fair play to least and greatest. 

New York, 10' 30 '09. 



THE REGIMENT 

THE traffic clears, and the crowd to the curb shifts 
to the roll of drums, 
As down the dusty avenue the long brown column 

comes. 
And their faces match their khaki. From Luzon's 

tropic suns 
They took this tan, and the glint of their eyes like 

the glitter of their guns 
Flamed on the way to Pekin till they saw the flag still 

there. 
They bear their faded colors past, and something in 

the air 
Lessens the roar of the city ! One gray bystander sees 
The Stars and Stripes at Gettysburg and faces set like 

these 
When death broke battle's mould. They pass, 

indomitable, strong, 
Wearing the deathless order of discipline. The throng 
Gentile and Jew and Kelt and Hun and their own 

blood brothers thrill 
To the ripple of their cadenced ranks; for now the 

drums are still 
And the measured tread of feet that marched to set 

the Cubans free, 
Falls on the asphalt like the sound of breakers when 

the sea 

167 



168 The IVeg'iment 

Strikes on the sands at midnight to mark the pulse 

of time. 
And the nation's heart-beat blends with them; the 

boys that breathless climb 
To a lamp-post or a column's height, the girls whose 

ardent eyes 
Wake to a world of fighting men and the dream that 

never dies, 
Embattled, grim, in touch with them; crude as brown 

powder grains 
That leap to life and shake the air when freedom fires 

her trains. 
Essential, hard, dynamic, fit and silent still they go, 
Down the pathway of their duty to a goal that none 

may know. 
Here is the nation's last reserve, these and their next 

of kin 
When the ends of earth are looted bare and the years 

of wrath begin. 
For each heart guards its citadel and these shall serve 

alone 
When millions fail and navies sink and forts are 

overthrown. 
They pass and the city's tumult throbs through its 

arteries 
And fills them full of greed and lust, dishonor and 

disease, 
And dreams insane of peace unearned, decadence and 

disgrace. 
But still the red blood corpuscles shall vitalize the race. 

New York, 10' 23 '09. 






THE BALLET 

LISTEN, the flutes of fairyland are sounding far 
away. 
And the curtain climbs, and the footlights flame like 

the dawn of a summer day 
And out of the shadows steal the sprites to whirl like 
the winds at play. 

You that are free from the bonds of flesh shall see 

them dancing there 
Through the lights, and the shadows' shifting mesh, 

immortal, fresh and fair 
Like the living notes of a song that floats forever in 

the air. 

Look where one comes to the sound of drums and 

oboes as she trips 
Touching the hidden hands of life with lifted finger 

tips, 
With the smiling pride of the premiere exultant on her 

lips. 

She is incarnate joy and youth, beauty whose soul is 

grace 
Like the flowers that sway in the breeze of May. 

And the spring has flushed her face. 
And the heart of the old world warms to her for an 

hour and a breathing space. 
169 



170 THe Ballet 

And the sombre soul of the city wakes to a season of 

delight 
And its plaudits fall as its pulses stir like the roses red 

and white 
She crushes to her bosom there to bear into the night. 

There there is sorrow and despair and the weight of 

lonely years, 
She goes to join her sisters there in an ocean salt with 

tears 
And the curtain falls. Like a breaking wave her 

triumph disappears. 

Day after day from the depths of life, from the ends 

of the earth they rise 
Wave after wave with its froth and foam and its 

impulse towards the skies. 
Night after night they cast their spray and they die 

as daylight dies. 

And the line of the ballet surging high like the comb- 
er's curving crest, 

Feels the pulse of life as it swells and falls by a pur- 
pose strong possessed, 

As passion on through Cosmos crawls to a harbor 
sure of rest. 

New York, 9' 21 '09. 



THE SYMPHONY 

THE great proscenium arch gapes wide, the gates 
of darkness fall. 
A single cornet's note has cried its challenge clear to 

all. 
Each crowded tier at either side thrills through the 
darkened hall. 

We look into another world; God's stage with music 

set, 
We watch the leader's baton swing, and cares and 

fears forget, 
Our breath and pulses keep his time, and weary eyes 

grow wet. 

We hear the rustle of the leaves, like winds that wake 

at dawn. 
To whisper peace to sleepless ears. On faces white 

and drawn 
The dew of heaven's kisses lies. The hour of rest is 

gone. 

Swift as the rush of sunrise as the rays that blazon day 
The full crescendo sings and soars. A skylark melts 

away 
In music in the blue above. The shades no more 

delay. 

171 



17 2 THe Symphony 

They fade; all silence ceases as noon comes surging 

high. 
An arm that drags the zenith down is raised to reach 

the sky, 
To lift a thousand dormant souls from depths where 

spirits die. 

He grips us, gains us, holds us; for his moment rare, 

supreme. 
The master's soul reborn in him has realized its dream. 
And heaven on high and earth below one world, one 

second seem. 

A string has snapped, the tension breaks, the sym- 
phony is flawed, 

A woman laughs. Another yawns. The brute but 
half o'erawed 

Stirs restlessly. Men plan again, the tools of greed 
and fraud. 

For sunset always follows noon. The powers of 

darkness rise 
To meet a meteor chord that falls in splendor from the 

skies ; 
The leader's pride like Lucifer's grows less before our 

eyes. 

We were too weary to applaud. And night's forget- 

fulness 
Fell like a curtain on our pain. To-day through 

storm and stress 
The echoes rise, insistent, strong, to stir and save and 

bless. 



THe Symphony 173 

For we are weak, unresting, blind. She is not here to 

see, 
To say our triumphs have not failed, our hour is yet 

to be, 
Our losses are our instruments in heaven's symphony 

Paris, 12' 26 '08. 






the;camera • 

SINCE you have not eyes to see 
Since you have not faith to find 
Vision, vistas, liberty; 
I was made to aid the blind. 

I am beauty's dwarf and slave, 
Cramped and colorless and cold. 
Black my art is. From the grave 
I can charm your hours of old. 

When the summer suns have set, 
Winter's twilight stark and white 
I invade lest you forget 
All the loveliness of light. 

Where the slum, a shadow black 
Bars your trail to things above, 
I adventure, bringing back 
Children's laughter, youth and love. 

Prisoned beauty's slave I speed; 
Painter, poet, errant knight; 
Cry for succor till you heed, 
Then she blesses you with light. 

Paris, ii' 19 '08. 



174 



X— VERITIES 
PIONEERS 

THEY have blazed the way with bloodshed 
where their fires of torture burned, 
Signals black of smoke that showed where danger lay. 
And the young men turned to seek them. And their 

strong hearts westward yearned 
And went camping with the sun from day to day. 

And they followed running water and took counsel 

with the breeze 
And the stars they closely questioned when they 

could. 
And their sign-posts were the mosses and the slanting 

trunks of trees 
In the darkness and the dangers of the wood. 

Close behind them came their women. They were 

splendid, brave and strong ; 
Fresh and fair as forest children that they bore. 
They were freedom's primal pilgrims. Love and war 

their marching song 
Through the shadowed silence echoed more and more. 

175 



176 Pioneers 

Through the forest's dim cathedrals, through the 

windows autumn stained, 
As they went their eyes were wise the truth to see. 
From the foes that lay in ambush where the red man's 

arrows rained, 
From the wilderness of death their souls went free. 

In the distance they are calling through the ghosts of 

fallen trees 
Where the city's voice makes deaf our modern ears- 
We have dulled our eyes with ledgers, loosed the 

sinews of our knees, 
Shortened breath and stride, who once were pioneers. 

But the impulse and the measure of their marching 

stirs us still, 
And the instinct of the race that shall not fail ; 
While we bring the big battalions of to-day to work 

their will 
And we follow where they scouted down the trail. 

Paris, 5' 11 '09. 



THE TALENT 

SO when this man was on his sick-bed laid 
And tasted death his heart grew sore afraid, 
"O God, if there be any God," he prayed. 

"Because Thy law was hard I lived in fear. 
Wrapped in its napkin see Thy talent here, 
Shrouded and saved for Thee this many a year." 

And Life, his lord, made answer : "Thou hast failed 
Miser of years and seconds death assailed. 
Nor has thy cowardice at all availed. 

"Life is thy talent, thine to use or lose, 
Hoarded it wastes like withered heart and thews, 
Life is a game where all must stake and choose. 

" Life is a battle where no mortal may 
Stand and look on, where all one law obey, 
And none dare shrink and shameless steal away. 

"Who wrestles not with life and fells his foes, 
Holds fast his wife and children; never knows 
Warrior's and lover's triumphs, trials and woes; 

"Who sleepless serves not science, toils nor prays 
Through art's long ritual of laborious days, 
To raise his God made flesh that lives always ; 

12 177 



178 The Talent 

"Who in love's sacraments has never shared; 
Feasted his friends, nor for the dying cared; 
Nor his own sleep to save the starving spared; 

"He has not lived. In him the vital flame 
Reverting trembles backward whence it came, 
And he shall die, as dies unheard his name." 

Then said life's traitor, "Lord what shall I do?" 
Answered his Master, "Sleep, then strive anew.' 
And round his eyes the veil of darkness drew. 

S. S. Nawa, 3' 21 '09. 



THE VISION 

DEAD walls have made your spirits dead, and 
dust has dulled your eyes. 
You see a single step ahead. You haggle and devise. 
You crowd one corner of the earth to count and hoard 

your gold, 
Misers of love and smiles and mirth, whose souls for 
shams are sold. 

The dawn is robed in splendor. You will not wake 

to see. 
From twilight's promise tender you hurry breathlessly 
Into the blaze of restless nights that counterfeit the 

day. 
The stars hang out their signal lights. Your thoughts 

are far away. 

Your brothers toil in darkness long. Their children 

starve and die. 
Out of their sickness you grow strong. You steal 

from them the sky. 
You cheat the blind. The weak you maim. You 

grudge them light and air. 
You take your tithes of women's shame that makes 

your daughters fair. 

Your whole horizon slowly shrinks as your hard hearts 

shrink 
While you relinquish wholly freedom to feel and think. 

179 



180 The Vision 

You are but babes within the womb of the travail 

of to-day 
Till angels from your living tomb shall roll the rock 

away. 

Sorrow maybe or a baby's smile; and your soul is born 

anew. 
And you raise your eyes in wonder while the sunrise 

turns to blue. 
And you see the sky in a tuft of flowers, in a gutter 

urchin's eyes, 
And the rain comes rippling down in showers on the 

streams of Paradise. 

And you see the streets of the city, and the blind and 

breathless throng. 
And a part of an infinite pity has made your purpose 

strong ; 
From all that chokes and thwarts and kills, the 

prisoners to set free 
On the holy places of the hills and the highways of the 

sea. 

Beauty that is your heritage belongs to you once 
more, 

And the child's true heart that cannot age, that smil- 
ing shall adore; 

The loveliness that will redeem the lives you learn to 
share. 

You have awakened to the dream and the Vision that 
is prayer. 

Bath Beach, 9' 8 '09. 






THE MACHINE 

WHEN Joseph ruled in Egypt he was master of 
our craft, 
And Pharaoh's prison taught him how the wheels 

were greased with graft; 
And he taxed the people shrewdly, and he made his 

little deal 
With the priest's machine that hated him since less 
was left to steal. 

When Caesar wrote his Gallic War, the senate fixed 

the slate, 
And they shipped him to the Philippines to sidetrack 

him, too late. 
And he went and made his own machine of iron 

fighting men 
And the legions smashed the primaries, and he was 

boss again. 

This is creation's story from the first primeval years 
When the cave-men shamans got their grip on king 

and people's fears 
And they worked the spirits overtime, till some one 

guessed the game 
And made them stand in with him. And it 's always 

been the same. 

People are sheep. We 've Scripture's word for it, 

and so they know 
But very little more about the way they ought to go. 

181 



1 82 The Machine 

You fleece them close; their wool grows fast. And if 

you did n't — why 
Worse wolves than we are waiting, and they 'd simply 

stray and die. 

You 've got to keep them in the rut. You crowd them 

on the train, 
You 've got to have conductors and brakemen and 

the brain 
That built and fired the engine; and that fires the 

driver too 
When he gets to think he knows it all, and has no use 

for you. 

We had to live like other men, and so we took our 

share. 
Maybe it was a bit too large. So now we pay our 

fare. 
We keep the traffic moving though. One thing we 

know. The way 
To make men value anything like freedom. Make 

them pay. 

If they won't give time or blood, then cash. We can't 

and won't step down, 
And let reformers wreck the train, so long as any 

town 
They can't make good in for two years. But when 

they 've learned the game, 
And win promotion to our place, we '11 be more glad 

than tame. 

Paris, n' 1 8 '08. 



THE PRAETORIANS 

CARTHAGE had her money kings that spoiled 
the seven seas, 
Trusts that stole and slew and Hed and lusted at 

their ease, 
Wholesale hired their soldiery, safety bought with 

shame, 
Tempted Rome to war with them and sank in blood 
and flame. 

Rome that thinned her legions' blood learned to 

decimate 
Valor of her pioneers that made her strong and great, 
Formed her Caesars' body-guards of aliens; paid 

them well, 
Lost the art of war herself and then went down to 

hell. 

Likewise in Byzantium we were Varangars, 

Ruin and revolt repulsed, and tribute took for scars, 

Milked the gambling houses dry, and taxed the 

prostitute, 
Saw the church complacent eye our long campaign of 

loot. 

183 



1 84 The Praetorians 

Now we pay praetorians, Irish, Germans, Jews; 
Do our stealing wholesale and their protection use ; 
Let them scare the little thieves and lock them up 

for life, 
If they won't divide the graft ; let them hold the knife 

To our own throats now and then, reckless in our haste ; 
Let them tax the powers that prey, spoil, defile and 

waste ; 
Let them make their red machines the image of our 

own. 
(So we have to compromise where once we thieved 

alone). 

After us the deluge. Shameless in our greed, 
Nero and Caligula, we our people bleed. 
Roundsmen and praetorians who have learned the 

game, 
Goad the slums to savagery: all human and the same. 

Messalina motors past, our predestined mate. 
Arabs, Kaffirs, Japanese look and lust and hate. 
Shadows of their airship swarms fall athwart our sky. 
Manhood, freedom for our sons our money may not 
buy. 

Paris, n' 26 '08. 



THE HOME 

WELL our Paradise was lost; 
Sinless Eden made our own 
Wistfully in dreams alone; 
Hut of snow in polar frost, 
Cave or tent or open sky, 
Where we trysted, you and I : 
Eden found in children's smiles. 

Love, the endless weary miles 
That our restless race has trod 
On its road that leads to God 
Still are urgent incomplete. 
Still the murmur of the sea 
Makes our moments' threnody : 
Life so short and life so sweet. 

Well our Paradise was won; 
Shadow in the tropic sun, 
Castle warm in winter's cold, 
Harbor where our hearts shall hold 
Cables sure a little ,space ; 
Shrine that sanctifies your face 
And the child that looks to you. 
185 



1 86 The Home 

. Dear, if anything is true, 
Dear, if anything is dear, 
We shall find our treasure here. 
In the city's shadowed hells 
Something sacred somewhere dwells. 
Dear, if anything is strong 
We shall save them who belong 
To our Captain's body-guard — 
Life so sweet and life so hard. 

S. S. Mamma, 3' 31 '09. 



THE UNFIT 

WE lacked the purpose long avowed, 
The master's will, the hero's soul. 
We walked and slumbered with the crowd. 
We lagged and lost the distant goal. 

Begotten of essential brute, 
Betrayed by error, want and vice, 
And baffled by each blind pursuit, 
Your burden and your sacrifice : 

We are your very flesh and blood. 
To us your children spoiled revert ; 
Since tides must ebb that have their flood. 
And more than us your own you hurt; 

Who blindly waste the wine of life, 
Who crush its bubbles, scorn its scent; 
Who busy in your breathless strife 
Would mutilate a continent. 

Since you have bound and crippled us 
Blinded and bought, yourselves you maim. 
We judge you false and covetous 
Since we are human, and the same. 
187 



188 The Unfit 

We have not learned to earn our joy. 
We dream a little and forget. 
Children of chaos, girl and boy. 
We are not fit to suffer yet. 

So have you thrust us toward the pit, 
Not ours the fault alone we know. 
We are unready and unfit, 
We are your youth. And we shall grow. 

San Francisco, 6' 4 '09. 



THE SLUM 

YOU have watered the primitive out of your lives. 
From the passive embraces of children and 
wives 
You race to the ticker. You Ve narrowed the sea, 
Sawed the forests to matchwood; and cycles to be 
The fruit of your haste shall enjoy at their ease, 
And the nature you hunt from the mountains and trees 
That you hustle and stunt, doubles back to us here. 
We are cave-men primeval with faces of fear. 
And wild eyes you have lured from Armenian hills 
And from Sicily's valleys, and hot hate that kills 
That we nurse in our hearts, in our gray granite hive 
When your cold blood grows thin shall yet keep you 

alive. 
Stop and look at our life, its crowds, color and smells, 
Its law of the jungle, its homes that are hells. 
We 're alive there though. You in your blank brown- 
stone blocks, 
And their bleakness that blinds you to shadows and 

shocks, 
And to high lights and harmony ; culture that dwells 
In apartment hotels that are life's prison cells, 
And is proud not to know its next door neighbor's 

name, 
You are cliff-dwellers too, and our tribe is the same. 

189 



190 TKe Sl\im 

You are cowards. Convention 's your castle and 

creed. 
And you live in its limbo. We; sickness and need 
Have taught us our joys and our sorrows to share 
With our money and matches . You hoard yours . B e 

fair, 
Try to focus the picture, the Master's last word, 
Big, impressionistic. Come down and be stirred 
By our poets, our prayers. Come to grips with our 

graft, 
For its germs breed in you, and we 're all in one craft. 
We 're the scum of creation? Salvation shall come 
For the race, for the nation, for all from the slum. 

Paris, 11' 16 '08. 



THE IRON CREED' 

WE are heirs of evolution and children of to-day, 
And from our own environment we may not 

break away. 
We may not sing like Homer gray, Olympus crowned 

with snow, 
And gods and demigods who war with men on earth 

below. 
We may not love as Dante did nor paint with Raph- 
ael's hand, 
For the mountains are brought low to-day; the plains, 

the sands expand. 
We may not cry the martyr's creed and soar on wings 

of flame. 
We may not live as hermits to adore one awful Name. 
We may not love one woman now and count the world 

well lost, 
We may not save our single souls at all creation's cost. 

Life has demanded more of us for it has given more. 
Though still the holy mountains call the soul to climb 

and soar. 
We may not live transfigured there, we may not love 

alone, 
We must come down and strive with men and make 

their cause our own. 

191 



19 2 TKe Iron Creed 

No more than bodies starved or maimed, may minds, 

may spirits fast, 
Efficiency becomes the creed of all the world at last. 
Salvation's price is greater now since life is more than 

death, 
As a searchlight in the storm excels an altar candle's 

breath. 
Our God to-day has many names, our heaven is power 

applied. 
Our hell the city's shams and shames, the waste of 

life denied. 

We have lost our last illusion, childhood of the race, 

The golden age that never was, the golden stairs of 
grace, 

Sinless heaven freely given, harbor safe at last, 

Life means wave on wave of storm and calm to strug- 
gle past. 

Sleep of death like earth in winter, growth that never 
ends, 

Love like radium whose rays make all the world its 
friends. 

Morning's shadows fade. The world must toil through 
noonday's blaze, 

Yet one living parable shall gladden iron days. 

Golden age forever safe in laughter of a child. 

Heaven smiled. Hell has them now who have that 
smile denied. 

Paris, 12' 9 '08. 



THE MESSAGE 

WHAT does it all mean? Simply this, 
Out of the blackness of the night 
Where planets swarm and suns expire; 
Sparks from the one eternal light, 
And voices of creation's choir 
We come to solve our share of bliss. 

We come to sound the human scale, 
To strive and suffer, seek and smile, 
From sorrow's lowest depths to soar 
To perfect joy a little while; 
Before our singing sounds no more 
To hear one echo ere we fail. 

We come to kindle light divine 
In eyes unborn and blind and dim, 
Till risen spirits wake and see 
Some vision strong of seraphim, 
That war on earth eternally 
And human life with heaven align. 

We come to live and love and learn ; 
The vast of space to comprehend, 
The atom's essence to explore, 
The mind's dominion to extend; 
To war with darkness more and more 
While heaven's beacons brighter burn. 
15 193 



194 THe Message 

We come to live and learn and love ; 
To hush and raise to harmony 
The discords harsh of sin and pain, 
To merge the past and time to be 
Within one vibrant heart and brain; 
And singing clear, to soar above. 



Paris, ii' 19 '08. 



ENVOY 
THE IRON MUSE 

DEAREST, I saw the city of the dead, 
The shadowed streets of space; each starry 

light 
Where the great sords that conquered storm and night 
And cold that stills the heart, that stumbled, bled, 
And rose from sin and shame, eternally 
Stride on the Master's errands; nor regret 
The loves they left on earth, that might not be; 
Though in their dreams they see us dimly yet. 
And linking earth and heaven and hell's unstarred 

abysm, I saw 
The iron strands of one supreme unalterable law. 

Midnight His smithy is. The lightnings are 
Sparks from His forge. His anvil earth. At dawn 
His fire flames forth, His steel is shaped and drawn; 
And men His patterns learn to make or mar 
In freedom's likeness. So our fathers wrought 
His image in the name of Liberty ; 
And thought the idol that their blood had bought 
Forever should be spotless, strong and free. 

i95 



196 THe Iron Muse 

We who are sad and stained; who stronger still 

through struggle grow; 
Freedom that rests not from her war forever, learn to 

know. 

Dearest, there may be planets younger yet; 
Americas unborn may wait us there, 
New worlds to win, more fertile and more fair, 
Where we our earthly warfare shall forget ; 
Where pain and shame may seem a little thing, 
Like joy and triumph done with long ago ; 
And love itself a song too old to sing, 
When we the fulness of God's heavens shall know. 
It may be so above; below to-day our dwelling-place 
Time-stained and strong, grows ever dearer, fairer, 
like your face. 



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